Steve Jobs created immense wealth over his lifetime as the co-founder of Apple — now the most valuable company in the world.
But for Jobs, the work was never about becoming rich.
“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important,” Jobs said in 1996 PBS documentary. He co-founded Apple in 1976, as a 21-year-old. “I never did it for the money.”
Even later in his career, when Jobs was losing money, he held the same mentality. For example, after a particularly volatile year for Apple’s stock in the early 1980s cost Jobs $250 million, he told Playboy he was unconcerned. (Although at that time, it was a fortune to lose for the newly public company and young entrepreneur.)
“I’m not going to let it ruin my life,” Jobs told Playboy in 1985. “Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past 10 years.”
In fact, Jobs intentionally avoided prioritizing wealth, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, who conducted over 40 interviews with Jobs for his book, “Steve Jobs.” Even after Jobs was a billionaire — married to Laurene Powell Jobs and raising his children — he sought to avoid a flashy lifestyle.
“His house in Palo Alto is a house on a normal street with a normal sidewalk — no big winding driveway, no big security fences,” Isaacson recalled to CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “You could walk into the garden in the back gate and open the back door to the kitchen which used to not be locked. It was a normal family home.”
