In another two months, it would be four years since Steve Jobs left us. Tell that to the Apple fanatics and they would tell you how it feels as if the legend had just gone yesterday. But who can blame them when the Apple God’s legacy still survives to this very moment, in a physical way.

Early this year, it was reported that Apple Inc. has chosen to leave his top-floor, corner office completely untouched since his death. No, you silly cow, it wasn’t because his room was haunted by the technology innovator in any way that people could actually see him working on iPhone7 or something like that.

 

It was because Jobs’ closest buddy – Jony Ive – couldn’t live to have his best friend’s office closed down because that would mean the closing down of his legacy. Steve Jobs name is still on the door of “One Infinite Loop”, which is connected to Ive’s lab “Two Infinite Loop” via a covered corridor. Both Jobs and Ive offices were the only two buildings on Apple’s campus connected in such a way.

When Apple was started, Steve Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak were as good as broke. Wozniak sold his prized calculator for US$250 and Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for US$1,500. Differences in opinion happened and soon Steve Jobs left to start his NeXT Computers after being booted out of the very company he co-founded.

 

Later, Apple purchased Jobs’ company, NeXT Computers, bringing Jobs back to the company as CEO working for US$1 per year in compensation. When Apple went public on Dec 12, 1980, Jobs’ 7.5 million shares were worth US$217 million in 1980. Not bad for an investment of US$1,500. When he died in 2011, he was worth US$11 billion.

You may think that was a freaking lot of money. But he did a silly thing when he was ousted from Apple by then-CEO John Sculley and its board. He sold “all” but “one” of his original shares in 1985. Had he not sold shares from day-1, Jobs would have been the world’s richest person with net worth of about US$127 billion as of early 2014.

 

Of course, it would be worth much more today, considering how Apple shares have skyrocketed since last year. But it wasn’t money which inspired Steve Jobs. After all, he was already worth US$1 million at age 23, US$10 million at 24 and US$250 million at age 25. But assuming Steve Jobs is still alive today; can anybody actually blackmail him out of some of his fortune?

In case you didn’t know, there was this classic relationship between Steve Jobs and his first girlfriend – Chrisann Brennan. The pair met at age 17 in 1972, as students at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. They had an on-again, off-again romance over five years. They never married, but lived together for parts of that time.

He got her pregnant at age 18, and by their agreement, she had an abortion. The same happened again when she was 23. When Lisa was born in May 1978, the already wealthy Jobs named one of Apple’s first personal computers after his daughter. But he never publicly admitted Lisa was his daughter.

At one point, Jobs even swore in a signed court document that he couldn’t be Lisa’s father because he was “sterile and infertile,” and lacked “the physical capacity to procreate a child.” Amusingly, he had three more children after marrying wife Laurene Powell in 1991. Lisa, now 37, had a volatile relationship with her father but was at his bedside when he died.

In 2013, two years after Mr Jobs died following his cancer battle, Miss Brennan published her memoir called: “The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs”. Apparently, she disclosed how she had sent a two-page letter to Jobs in Dec 2005. A self-described “transmutational” painter and sculptor, Brennan claimed she was struggling financially then.

She wrote Jobs: “I have raised our daughter under circumstances that were all together too tough and tougher than they needed to be … Obviously it was all the more confusing and difficult because you had so much money … something is incomplete … I believe that decency and closure can be achieved through money. It is very simple.”

 

Miss Brennan, now 60, admits that Mr Jobs did pay for two cars, a US$400,000 house for her and Lisa’s private education including her time at Harvard. But she claimed that she was “unable to get past the years of loss” raising Lisa on her own. She even accused Mr Jobs of a “sort of theft” and urged him to “do us all a favour” by paying up.

In the letter Miss Brennan asks for a US$25 million “gift” for herself and another US$5 million for Lisa. She claims in the letter that the money will not only improve her relationship with Mr Jobs, but it will also make things better with Lisa too and that she will spend more time in California with them instead of living away.

 

Miss Brennan also reminded Mr Jobs that she did not turn Lisa against him. More than three years after writing Jobs and asking for money, Brennan tried again. In 2009 – sick, out of money, and living with friends – she contacted him again. This time she offered to shelve the book in exchange for Jobs’ financial settlement.

And what was Steve Jobs’ reaction? He angrily refused a demand for the US$30 million from the mother of his eldest daughter because he felt like she was blackmailing him. “I don’t react well to blackmail,” Jobs wrote back that day, copying Lisa, then 31. So, if Steve is alive today and you plan to blackmail him in any way, good luck!

 

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August 9th, 2015 by financetwitter

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