Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) in 1976 co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak. Jobs helped popularize the concept of the home computer with the Apple II, and was one of the first to see the commercial potential of the GUI and mouse. He oversaw the integration of these technologies into the Apple Macintosh. He also led Apple Computer through its recent iPod-powered resurgence.

Jobs also was Chairman and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, an independent film production company that has produced acclaimed animated shorts and features such as The Incredibles and Toy Story. The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock, a deal expected to close by the summer of 2006. The transaction will make Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder and will give him a seat on the company's board of directors.

Jobs went to Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and attended after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, California. Soon, he was hired there and worked with Stephen Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but he dropped out after one semester. Years later, when speaking at a Stanford University graduation ceremony in 2005, Jobs said he remained at Reed attending classes, including one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak, 26, founded Apple Computer Co. to market a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use. Initially their plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, but when a local computer store ordered a batch of complete, assembled computers, they went into the computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced was called the Apple I. It sold for $666.66, in reference to the phone number of Wozniak's Dial-a-Joke machine, which ended in -6666. In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II, which became a huge success in the home market and made Apple an important player in the nascent personal computer industry.

1984 saw the introduction of the Macintosh, the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and the team was inspired by technology that had been developed at Xerox PARC, but not yet commercialized. Apple had paid a fee for use of the PARC technology. The success of the Macintosh led Apple to abandon the Apple II in favor of the Mac product line, which continues to this day.

After leaving Apple, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like Apple's Lisa computer, the NeXT workstation (one of NeXT Computer's first products) was technologically advanced, but it never was able to break into the mainstream because of its high cost.

In 1997, Apple bought NeXT for $402 million, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. In 1997 he became Apple's interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio. Upon returning to the leadership of Apple, Jobs used the title of "iCEO". In March of 1998 Jobs abruptly terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company."

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs' guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac. Since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple.

In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, the iTunes Music Store, the company is making forays into personal electronics and online music. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that "real artists ship," by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and killer design.

Jobs worked at Apple for several years with an annual salary of $1, and this earned him a listing in Guinness World Records as the "Lowest Paid Chief Executive Officer". At the 2000 keynote speech of Macworld Expo in San Francisco, the company dropped the "interim" from his title. His current salary at Apple officially remains $1 per year, although he has traditionally been the recipient of a number of lucrative "executive gifts" from the board, including a $90 million jet in 1999, and just under 30 million shares of restricted stock in 2000-2002. As such, Jobs is well compensated for his efforts at Apple despite the nominal one-dollar salary.

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division from George Lucas for $10 million and named the new computer animation studio Pixar. Jobs's new company, which was based in Emeryville, California, contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated feature films, which Disney would co-finance and distribute.

Jobs married Laurene Powell, nine years his junior, on March 18, 1991 and has three children with her. He also has a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, with Chris Brennan, a woman he did not marry.