Steven P. Jobs

Age: 52

Board Afflilations: The Walt Disney Company (DIS)

WHAT HE DOES
Steve Jobs, who cofounded Apple in 1976, leads the company and its lines of Mac computers, iPod media players, iTunes online music and video store, and the recent iPhone. He is also Disney’s largest individual shareholder.

WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
Being an iconoclast. Jobs told New York Times reporter John Markoff that doing LSD was one of the most important things he had done in his life. In addition to creating Apple’s first computer in his parents’ garage, Jobs dropped out of college, dated Joan Baez, and traveled around India.

He also dropped out of Apple for a while. Viewed as an erratic, arrogant manager, Jobs was ousted by the board in 1985. But after the company foundered in the face of competition from Microsoft Windows-based P.C.’s, he returned in 1997 and saved it with a series of slick moves and landmark product releases.

In his second era of leadership, Jobs has been a little mellower. He swallowed his pride and partnered with archrival Microsoft on an Apple-compatible version of its Office software. But as he led the company through the release of its candy-colored line of iMac computers and its OS X operating system, his famous ego soon had reason to resurface. As Apple rebounded, Jobs released the iPod portable music device in 2001, a sensation that left competitors—from Microsoft to Dell to Sony—scrambling to catch up. With the release of the iPhone in June 2007, Jobs moved Apple into the wireless-device industry—in which the verdict on its success is still out.

A marketing genius, Jobs is quick to criticize his peers (and even co-workers) for lacking innovation. It was his idea to open sleek, modern Apple stores, which have bolstered both sales and the company’s image worldwide.

Despite his hippie image and deceptively low salary (one dollar annually, earning him the title of lowest-paid C.E.O. in the Guinness Book of World Records), Jobs is a savvy businessman who is worth roughly $5.7 billion in 2007, according to Forbes magazine.

Jobs is also a movie mogul. Rather than lick his wounds after being fired from Apple, he rebounded a year later with one of his most lucrative deals, buying Lucasfilm’s computer division for $10 million in 1986 and renaming it Pixar. Jobs sold the company to Disney in 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal that gave him a stake in the company and a seat on the board.

WHERE HE’S FROM
Born in San Francisco in 1955, Jobs was put up for adoption by his biological parents and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View, California. He married Laurene Powell in 1991 and the couple lives in Silicon Valley with their three children. Jobs also has a daughter from a previous relationship. He met his biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, for the first time as an adult.

WHERE HE’S GOING
Perennially competitive and famously enthusiastic, Jobs relishes his company’s image as a hipper alternative to Microsoft-based products. Ads running in 2006 and 2007 featured a hipster as the Mac brand, while the Microsoft PC was depicted by a stiff in a cheap suit. Jobs truly believes Apple is changing the world, and he plans to push the company’s consumer-technology agenda as far as it will go, starting with the iPhone. —Clancy Nolan