Steve Jobs: ‘I never did it for the money’

He had, according to one former colleague, an ”athletic, bouncy swagger, weight balanced towards the tips of his toes — rather like a boxer, aggressive and elusively graceful, or like an elegant jungle cat ready to spring at its prey”. Steve Jobs is a man who inspires superlatives. This week he launched Apple’s iTunes digital music store in London, with a little help from the singer Alicia Keys. It was the latest of his brainchildren to be presented over here, a year after its successful launch in the US.

Jobs is a co-founder of Apple, the man behind the astonishing success of the computer animation firm Pixar — of Toy Story and Finding Nemo fame — a billionaire regarded as a visionary in the industry. Yet compared with Bill Gates he is practically unknown.

”Partly it’s because Bill Gates has a lot more money,” says Alan Deutschman, the author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, a book that recorded Jobs’ triumphal return to success after being ousted from the company he formed.

”There’s an aura to being the richest person in the world that a mere billionaire like Steve Jobs doesn’t have,” Deutschman says. ”Also, Microsoft has extraordinary reach as a company and far more people know its products than Apple’s: 400 million people use Microsoft Office, for instance. Gates’s position in both business and philanthropy makes him something vaguely like a chief of state when he visits places like India or China.”

Born to an Egyptian Arab father and an American mother in Green Bay, Wisconsin, 49 years ago, Steven Paul was adopted soon after his birth by Paul and Clara Jobs, who lived in Mountain View in Santa Clara, California. He grew up in northern California at a time when the state was at the centre of two separate universes: technological innovation and the psychedelic music scene that was taking over from the British pop boom of the 60s.

Both worlds clearly had a major impact on Jobs, who never seems to have lost the attitude of west coast libertarianism still reflected in his dress style — he was wearing, as usual, his trademark black turtleneck and blue jeans this week — and his open affection for the music iTunes is now purveying. ”It all comes down to artists,” he said this week of iTunes’s 700 000 songs, which can be downloaded legally for 79p a time. ”That’s why we do this. It’s for the music.”

Bob Dylan remains his favourite artist and he has described meeting Dylan as one of the high points of his life.

After completing high school in Cupertino in northern California, Jobs went north to study physics, literature and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after one term. Back in California and already interested in computers, he became a regular at the now legendary Homebrew Computer Club, along with another young man, five years his senior, with his own visions of the future: Steve Wozniak.

In 1976, when Jobs was 21, he and Wozniak started their own business, the Apple Computer Company, which at the time was based in Jobs’ family garage. According to legend Jobs sold his prized Volkswagen campervan to finance the original design. With a mission to produce affordable personal computers the long-haired, bearded pair went to market with the Apple I shortly afterwards. A local company ordered 25 of the prototype and the pair were on their way. The almost instant success of Apple I and its sister Apple II launched them. By the age of 25 Jobs was worth $165-million.

Apple was the first landmark in Jobs’ career but by 1985 he was on his way out after John Sculley, who had joined the company from Pepsi-Cola, decided it was time to drop the pilot. Four years later Jobs returned with another computer company, NextStep, which never achieved the success of Apple but reminded people that he was far from a finished force who would be content to live out his life on the millions he had accumulated during his career.

What was later hailed as Jobs’ second coming started with his involvement in Pixar, the animation company he bought from the Star Wars director, George Lucas, and renamed. The hit movie Toy Story instantly established it as one of the key players in Hollywood, a success only amplified last year with the release of Finding Nemo.

Pixar made Jobs a billionaire. But more significantly his triumph there also reminded people of his ability to divine the technological future. Apple, which was by then starting to taste stale, if not exactly rotting, asked him to return. He came back in 1997 and within a year the ailing company was once more posting handsome profits.

Deutschman says the most interesting thing he learned about Jobs when researching the book was how close he had sailed to the wind. ”Even though he made a fortune from Apple, I learned that he nearly blew it all on his follow-up ventures, Next and Pixar, and he very came close to giving up his business career entirely before Pixar ultimately emerged as a success.”

Gil Amelio, the chief executive and chairperson of Apple who was sacked by Jobs after the latter’s return, has a less rosy picture of his former employer. ”He is one of those magnetic, charismatic personalities that light up a room,” he wrote in On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple. ”But his invaluable contributions can be largely overshadowed by the dissension he sows.”

In his brief time at the helm, Amelio was to find that Jobs could be unpredictable.

”That’s the way it went with Steve — flip-flopping from a soaring high, when he was an absolute delight to be around, to a mood of extreme anger or intense gloom that excluded any rational or civil conversation. I would get to see so many varieties of moods that I never knew exactly who I would be facing.”

Amelio said Jobs’ return to Apple had created in the business media ”a groundswell equivalent to one that would be created for a resurrected Eva Peron”.

If Jobs’ two stints with Apple, his founding of NextStep and his involvement with Pixar represent his first four ages, his latest venture may turn out to be as influential as any of them. Since the emergence of high-speed internet the music industry has complained that it is on the brink of being brought to its knees by the pirates of downloading. The holy grail being hunted by hundreds of companies has been a way to harness the desire for music on the internet and turn it into profit. Jobs believes that iTunes is the answer.

But then Jobs does not believe in underselling his companies. ”This will go down in history as the turning point for the music industry,” he told Fortune magazine at the launch of iTunes in the US last year, when the company was proudly debuting unreleased material from Dylan and such bands as the Eagles, who had never previously allowed their songs to be used in this way. ”This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it.” This week he described the launch in London and other European capitals as ”bringing the digital musical revolution around the world”, and he is characteristically bullish about seeing off existing rivals in Britain.

Journalists who have followed Jobs’ career have also seen the mercurial side of his personality when he has walked out of interviews, irritated at the line of questioning and refusing intrusions into his personal life. The patience of Jobs is not legendary.

”We can’t have a heroic figure without a fatal flaw,” was the assessment of David Plotnikoff, writing a profile earlier this year in Jobs’ local paper, the San José Mercury news. ”Jobs … exudes arrogance of a certain blastfurnace intensity that people find hard to overlook … With Jobs, it was never enough to say ‘we’re right on this and they’re wrong’. No, it was always ‘we’re right on this and they’re idiots’.”

But Plotnikoff added: ”There is simply no way the Mac could have been born without that supreme confidence.” If there has been a theme to Jobs’ success it has been his genius, as it were, for finding other geniuses and promoting their brilliance.

Married to Laurene Powell since 1991, Jobs has four children and is a vegetarian with a keen interest in organic farming and art. His sister Mona Simpson, whose existence he discovered only when they were both grown-up success stories, is the novelist and author of Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father. His own story seems far from over. The latest chapter, which was unveiled in London this week, may already be a huge success, but the challenge facing Jobs will be coming up with his next innovation.

”It’s easy to copy ideas in computers and consumer electronics,” says Deutschman, ”so Apple has to continue to stay far enough ahead of the pack that it has some lead time to profit before others come charging in, and the company needs to maintain the fierce loyalty of its core followers.”

Life in short

Born: February 24 1955, Wisconsin

Education: Homestead high school, California; Reed College, Oregon

Family: Married with four children

Career: Co-founder and CEO, Apple Computer 1976-85, 1997- ; founder and president, NextStep 1985-96; co-founder and CEO Pixar, 1986-