Steve Jobs^†

Getting fired from Apple in 1985 was the making of him. The board pushed him out after a power struggle with CEO John Sculley, and he spent the next twelve years building NeXT and turning a $10 million Pixar purchase into a studio worth billions. Toy Story made him a billionaire before he ever set foot back in Cupertino. Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million in 1997, essentially buying Jobs back, and he turned a near-bankrupt company into the one that shipped the iPhone. The January 2007 keynote is still the gold standard for product launches.

His reputation never settled into one clean narrative. The person who handed the world the iPhone was also documented as a psychologically brutal manager who denied paternity of his first child for years and told people their work was worthless as a management technique. He delayed surgery for his pancreatic cancer for roughly nine months in 2003, pursuing alternative treatments first. When he died in 2011, Apple's annual revenue was $108 billion. The hagiography came fast and mostly stuck.

His biological father was a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattah Jandali. He didn't meet his biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, until his early thirties. He credited LSD as one of the two or three most important experiences of his life and said people who hadn't tried it couldn't fully understand him. He cycled through new Mercedes leases every six months to exploit a California DMV loophole, never putting plates on any of them. His reported final words were "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."

Crowds gathered at Apple Stores worldwide within hours of the announcement. California Governor Jerry Brown declared "Steve Jobs Day" on October 16, 2011, the date of an invitation-only memorial at Stanford University. Apple held a private employee memorial on October 19 with performances by Norah Jones and Coldplay. Disney CEO Bob Iger ordered parks to fly flags at half-staff for a week. Pixar's Brave (2012) included a dedicated tribute to his role at the studio.