Steve Jobs built one of the most valuable companies in history, was thrown out of it, and returned a decade later to rescue it from near-collapse. His career is the defining comeback story of modern business: a founder cast out of his own creation who came back to remake not just the company, but entire industries.
The Rise: A Garage Start-Up Becomes Apple
Steven Paul Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco and raised in what would become Silicon Valley. In 1976, at just 21, he co-founded Apple Computer with the engineer Steve Wozniak, selling early machines built around Wozniak’s designs and Jobs’s instinct for what ordinary people might want. The Apple II turned the young firm into a pioneer of the personal-computer boom, and when Apple went public in 1980 it made Jobs a multimillionaire before he turned 26.
In 1984 he unveiled the Macintosh, a machine whose graphical interface and marketing flair signalled the ambition that would define him. Its “1984” television advertisement became one of the most famous commercials ever made. But the Macintosh sold below expectations, and his relationship with the company’s management was fraying.
The Fall: Ousted From His Own Company
In 1985, after a power struggle with chief executive John Sculley, the man Jobs himself had recruited, Apple’s board sided against him and stripped him of operational authority. Jobs resigned and left the company he had built in a garage less than a decade earlier. He later described the ejection as devastating, yet also as one of the most creatively liberating events of his life.
Rather than retreat, he doubled down. He founded NeXT, a company building high-end computers whose software would prove far more important than its hardware. In 1986 he bought a small computer-graphics division from filmmaker George Lucas and turned it into Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar’s 1995 release of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, made Jobs a billionaire and reshaped Hollywood.
The Comeback: Return and Reinvention
The turning point came in 1996, when a struggling Apple bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back into the fold. He became chief executive in 1997 with the company months from potential bankruptcy. What followed is one of the great corporate turnarounds.
Jobs slashed a bloated product line, struck a headline-grabbing deal for Microsoft investment, and in 1998 launched the colourful iMac, restoring both Apple’s finances and its reputation for design. Then came a run of products that changed how people live: the iPod in 2001 and the iTunes Store reinvented the music business; the iPhone in 2007 redefined the mobile phone and set the template for the modern smartphone; and the iPad in 2010 opened the tablet market. Under his second tenure Apple grew from a rescue case into one of the most valuable companies on Earth.
Legacy
Jobs’s methods drew criticism as well as admiration. Former colleagues described him as demanding and often abrasive, a perfectionist who could be harsh with staff and dismissive of rivals. His insistence on tightly controlled, closed systems divided the technology world. Yet even critics conceded his rare gift for anticipating what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves.
He had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 and battled the illness for years while continuing to lead Apple. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died on 5 October 2011 at the age of 56.
The shape of his career remains its most striking feature. Jobs rose young, fell hard, spent his exile building the companies and skills that would define his second act, and returned to lead a comeback few thought possible. For a generation of entrepreneurs, his story became the archetype of resilience: proof that being cast out of the thing you built need not be the end, but the middle of the story.
