Before Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) became a trillion-dollar powerhouse and its logo a global symbol of innovation, Steve Jobs was thinking about something far more personal.
In the final months of his life, the man who helped invent the modern smartphone, redefine music, and reshape computing wasn't focused on the next iPhone launch or the company's market cap. He was focused on time — how little of it he had left, and how much of it he'd spent away from his kids.
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According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs told him, "I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." It was an unusually candid moment for a man known for control — control of design, of products, of the message. Jobs had always managed his image as tightly as his product launches. But in the quiet of his Palo Alto, California, home in 2011, weeks before his death from pancreatic cancer, he began confronting what he couldn't manage: lost time.
According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs met his friend Dean Ornish — a physician and preventive-health advocate — for lunch in his final weeks. During their conversation, Ornish asked if he was glad he'd had children. Ornish told The Times that Jobs didn't hesitate, saying, "It's 10,000 times better than anything I've ever done."
Jobs wasn't known for sentimentality. He could be sharp, demanding, and, at times, famously difficult — the kind of leader who expected the impossible and often got it. While colleagues described him as brilliant, they also described him as relentless. And yet, in that brief moment, his words revealed something far more human.
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To hear Jobs — a man who was often portrayed as intense, private, and exacting — call fatherhood his greatest achievement spoke volumes. It showed what even his success couldn't overshadow: the importance of family, even in a life driven by creation and control.
His relationships weren't always simple. He had a strained and often complicated bond with his eldest daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. To hear Jobs — a man who was often portrayed as intense, private, and exacting Brennan-Jobs, a story both of them later acknowledged with honesty and pain. But ultimately, Jobs's reflection made clear that his children were his true legacy — the one thing he couldn't design but valued most.
At the time of Jobs's death in October 2011, Apple's market value was hovering around $350 billion — staggering for a company that, under his leadership, had reinvented how people listen to music, communicate, and even think about technology. Less than a decade later, Apple would cross the trillion-dollar mark, cementing the financial legacy Jobs set in motion.
His personal net worth, reported by The Times as at least $6.5 billion, passed largely to his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. She has since become one of the world's wealthiest women and an influential philanthropist.
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Jobs understood capital better than most — not just the financial kind, but the creative and human capital that fuels it. His philosophy of simplicity turned complex technology into objects of desire, fueling an economy built on innovation. Yet when he reflected on his life, the return that mattered most wasn't measured in market cap, but connection.
"Steve made choices," Ornish recalled in The Times piece. "He was aware that his time on earth was limited. He wanted control of what he did with the choices that were left." Those choices — spending his last days surrounded by his wife and children instead of conference calls and prototypes — revealed a man who'd finally stopped optimizing and started living.
Jobs's story still resonates in a culture that glorifies productivity and endless hustle. His words remind entrepreneurs and investors alike that building something meaningful doesn't always mean scaling it. For someone who built one of the world's most valuable companies, his final verdict was simple: the richest return isn't on Wall Street — it's at home.
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