• Faith: Buddhist
• Career: Public Figure
• Birthday:  February 24, 1955
• Date of Death:  October 05, 2011

Steve Jobs was an inventor, businessman, and investor best known for co-founding the tech giant Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. Jobs 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 in 1995 and adopted shortly afterward. He attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing the same year. Wozniak and Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 to further develop and sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer.

Together, the duo gained wealth and fame a year later with the production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI), which led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh launched the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics and PostScript.

In 1985, Jobs left Apple after a long power struggle with the company’s board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, he took some Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher education and business markets, serving as its CEO. In 1986, he created the visual effects industry by funding the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm that eventually spun off independently as Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and became a leading animation studio, producing over 27 movies since. In 1997, he returned to Apple as CEO after the company acquired NeXT. He was primarily responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy.

 He worked closely with British designer Jony Ive to develop a line of services and products that had more significant cultural ramifications, starting with the “Think different” advertising campaign and leading to the iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPhone, iTunes, and iPad. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor in 2011, and in 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

What religion was Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs identified as a Buddhist. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking enlightenment before studying Zen Buddhism. After his trip to India, Jobs became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism through the Zen master Kobun Chino Otogawa. He engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States. He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Japanese cuisine, Zen, and Japanese artists like Hasui Kawase.