Steven Paul Jobs (/dʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, business magnate, inventor, and industrial designer. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are widely recognized as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
He was born in San Francisco to parents who had to put him up for adoption at birth; he was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. Jobs then attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out, and traveled through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism. Jobs's declassified FBI report stated that an acquaintance knew that Jobs had used marijuana and LSD while he was in college. Jobs once told a reporter that taking LSD was "one of the two or three most important things" he did in his life.