Steve Jobs on Leadership Transition

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

By early 1985 the Macintosh's failure to dent the IBM PC had strengthened Sculley's hand. In May, encouraged by director Arthur Rock, Sculley proposed reorganizing Apple to strip Jobs of the Macintosh group and park him over new-product development, a role that would have rendered the founder decorative. Jobs answered with a plan of his own to oust Sculley, but the scheme leaked; confronted, Jobs said he would leave, and the board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider, while Sculley made clear he held the votes. On September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted his letter of resignation to the board, and five senior Apple employees resigned with him to join his next venture. The ouster became the hinge of his biography: twelve years in exile, then a return with the operating system, the design taste, and the scar tissue that would save Apple.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told employees he had a tumor in his pancreas — a rare, less aggressive islet-cell neuroendocrine type, distinct from the usually fatal form of the disease. Biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for nine months, trying a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and treatments found online, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004 that appeared to remove the tumor; he received no chemotherapy or radiation, and Tim Cook ran the company meanwhile. Speculation mounted as his keynotes turned gaunt, and in August 2008 Bloomberg briefly published a prepared obituary with blanks for age and cause of death, which Jobs answered by paraphrasing Mark Twain on exaggerated reports of his death, then closed another presentation with a slide reading 110/70, his blood pressure. In January 2009 he took a six-month leave; Cook, who shared his rare blood type, offered a portion of his own liver and was refused. Jobs underwent a liver transplant in Memphis that April, with a prognosis described as excellent.

On January 17, 2011, Apple announced another medical leave so Jobs could focus on his health, with Cook again running day-to-day operations while Jobs stayed involved in major strategic decisions. He still appeared at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the developers' conference on June 6, and pitched Apple's proposed new campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7. On August 24, 2011, he resigned as chief executive, writing to the board that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations, he would be the first to let them know, and that unfortunately that day had come. He became chairman and named Cook his successor, and worked for Apple until the day before his death. He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of the tumor, his sister Mona Simpson reporting that his final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables repeated three times. Flags flew at half-staff at Apple and Microsoft; California declared October 16 Steve Jobs Day.

Jobs kept his giving private and thin. Shortly after leaving Apple in 1985 he formed the Steven P. Jobs Foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism, but closed it within the year as NeXT absorbed him; on returning to Apple in 1997 he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs, which were never restored, and Stanford Social Innovation Review later listed Apple among America's least philanthropic companies. He declined to sign the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010. He gave $50 million to Stanford's hospital, and Bono credited Apple-driven efforts with tens of millions of dollars for AIDS and HIV relief in Africa that inspired other companies to join. His honors tell the public story: the National Medal of Technology in 1985, awarded jointly with Wozniak by President Reagan; Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Decade in 1989; Fortune's most powerful person in business in 2007; and, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden in 2022 and induction as a Disney Legend in 2013.