Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate , inventor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman , and CEO of Apple ; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar ; a member of The Walt Disney Company 's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT . He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak
Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and German-American mother. He was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism . He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II , one of the first highly successful mass-produced
In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley . That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT , a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas 's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D c