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Benzinga
Benzinga
Jeannine Mancini

Steve Jobs' Daughter Says He Refused To Give Her His Old Porsche When She Was 9 —'You're Not Getting Anything. You Understand? Nothing'

Steve Jobs

Long before she wrote a memoir or inherited millions, Lisa Brennan-Jobs was just a 9-year-old hoping her dad might give her his old Porsche.

In an excerpt from her memoir, "Small Fry," in Vanity Fair in 2018, she recalled a moment that stuck — not because of the car, but because of what it revealed.

She'd heard that her father, Steve Jobs, liked to trade in his Porsches anytime one got scratched. So she asked, half-curious, half-hopeful: Could she have one when he was done with it?

"‘Absolutely not,' he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I'd made a mistake," she wrote. "‘You're not getting anything,' he said. ‘You understand? Nothing. You're getting nothing.'"

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She remembered the sting more than the words. "His voice hurt — sharp, in my chest."

It was one of many moments she describes in her memoir — not to attack her father, but to reckon with the complexity of who he was. She doesn't flatten him into a villain. But she doesn't soften the pain either.

Before Apple made him a household name, Jobs denied paternity when Lisa was born in 1978. He even told Time magazine in 1982 that "28% of the male population of the United States could be the father." A court-ordered test later found a 94.1% chance that he was.

Her mother, Chrisann Brennan — a painter and early Apple employee — raised Lisa alone, often relying on welfare. Jobs didn't start paying child support until the results came in, and even then, it started at just $385 a month.

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In 2015, Fortune reported that Jobs eventually did more. He bought Brennan two cars, purchased a $400,000 home for her, paid for Lisa's private school tuition, and gradually increased monthly support to $4,000. Still, Brennan reportedly said, "He was cheap as he could be. He under-provided for everything. It was always like pulling teeth to get him to step up."

Lisa recalled other emotional gaps too — like when she asked why he didn't keep any baby photos of her. She wondered aloud if she'd been an ugly baby. He didn't respond.

When she got to Harvard, Jobs reportedly refused to pay for her senior year. Family friends covered it instead. He reimbursed them years later.

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After his death in 2011, Fortune also reported that Jobs left Lisa a multimillion-dollar inheritance — though the vast majority of his $10.8 billion fortune went to his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. She later said she had no plans to pass that wealth on to his other three children. "If I live long enough, it ends with me," she told The New York Times in 2020, noting that Steve never cared much about accumulating money.

Some critics praised Lisa's memoir as thoughtful and restrained. Others saw it as a raw portrait of a father who could be emotionally absent, even cruel.

Lisa never claimed her intention was to settle scores. But the story she told — of asking for a used Porsche and being told she'd get "nothing" — made it hard to ignore just how much she had longed for something more.

Read Next: Are you rich? Here’s what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy.

Image: Shutterstock

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