Random Facts About Steve Jobs

I finally got around to reading the March 17, 2008 issue of Fortune, which had two articles on Steve Jobs.  Here are some highlights:

 

·         Steve Jobs is a Buddhist and a vegetarian.  When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 he tried nine months of “alternative methods” prior to undergoing successful surgery in 2004.

·         As of March 2008, Steve owned $682 million in Apple stock and a 7.3% stake in Disney, worth $4.6 billion.

·         Steve parks his Mercedes in handicapped spaces and refuses to put a license plate on the car, which he says is “a little game I play.”

·         He dated Joan Baez and Diane Keaton.

·         He was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs, a working-class California couple.  His biological father is Syrian born Abdulfattah “John” Jandali who impregnated Joanne Simpson, his biological mother, while the two were University of Wisconsin graduate students in 1955.  Unwed at the time, they gave Steve up for adoption, only to later marry.  They had another child, Mona Simpson, who grew up to become a critically acclaimed novelist and who did not know Steve was her brother until she was an adult.  Jandali abandoned the family when Mona was 4, jumping from job to job as a political science professor, before leaving academe.  Now 76, he is the food and beverage director at the Boomtown Hotel and Casino near Reno.  Mona wrote a book, The Lost Father, about her quest to find him.

·         Steve had a baby, Lisa, with Chrisann Brennan.  For two years he denied paternity while Lisa’s mother went on welfare.  Steve swore in a court document that he could not be Lisa’s dad because he was “sterile and infertile.”  He later acknowledged paternity.  Lisa Brennan-Jobs graduated from Harvard and is a writer.  Steve married Laurene Powell, a Stanford MBA and miraculously fathered three more children despite being infertile.