Fired, Back, and Racing Time: The Story of Steve Jobs

Key takeaways

• In 1985, at 30, Jobs lost his leading role at Apple when the board sided with John Sculley, the man Jobs himself had hired; he resigned in September 1985.
• Ronald Wayne sold his 10% of Apple 12 days after it was founded, for $800; that share is now estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
• Pushed out, he built NeXT and bought Pixar; Toy Story (1995) and Pixar's share sale made him a billionaire, and Apple's purchase of NeXT brought him back in 1997.
• In 2003 a scan found a rare, slower-growing tumour on his pancreas; he waited about nine months before surgery and later regretted it, and no one can know whether operating sooner would have saved him.
• Told he might have 3 to 6 months, he lived about eight more years and launched the iPhone, the App Store and the iPad; he died on 5 October 2011, aged 56.