A Private Individual
A
lthough Steve Jobs loves talking about his various busi-
nesses, he is less forthcoming about his personal life.
Little is known about how Jobs spends his wealth. He is not
very materialistic. He dresses in jeans, tennis shoes, and black
turtleneck shirts. He lives with his family in an average size
ranch-style home in a middle-class neighborhood in Palo Alto,
California, near Stanford University.
Although he is involved in charitable pursuits, he rarely
speaks of them. It is known that he set up charities in India
that help poor blind people.
Otherwise, he admits to being happily married, a Zen
Buddhist, and a vegetarian. In fact, he bought a vacant house
next door to his own house and tore it down in order to turn
the lot into a large organic garden. Here, he grows many of
the foods his vegetarian family consumes. He is so enthusiastic
about vegetarianism and eating healthy that he insisted the
vending machines at Apple and NeXT offered healthy snacks.
On Halloween, he hands out little bottles of carrot juice to
trick or treaters.
It was not the type of computer that the average person would
buy. So, in 1981, even before Lisa hit the market, Jobs turned his
attention to another new computer, the Macintosh (Mac), a low-
priced, user-friendly machine, conceived of by Apple engineer Jef
Raskin. It meshed perfectly with Jobs’s vision of the future. The
Macintosh was a computer for the average person. It would, Jobs
insisted, change the world.
Although Raskin came up with the original idea for the
Macintosh, it was Jobs who brought the machine into existence.
He handpicked an extremely talented team of about forty scien-
tists to build it, housed them in a separate building that flew a
pirate flag, and told them that it was better to be a pirate than to
join the navy. By this, he implied that it was okay to break the
rules.
56 Steve Jobs