Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was adopted by a machinist and his wife in Mountain View, California. He dropped out of Reed College after one semester, slept on floors, returned Coke bottles for food money, and dropped in on a calligraphy class that would later inspire the Mac's beautiful typography. In 1976, he and Steve Wozniak started Apple in his parents' garage; a decade later, he was forced out of his own company. That failure became his liberation. He built NeXT (whose technology would eventually power every Mac, iPhone, and iPad) and Pixar (which revolutionized animation). When Apple bought NeXT in 1997, Jobs returned to a company ninety days from bankruptcy and transformed it into the most valuable on Earth. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, each seemed impossible until he made it inevitable.