Steve Jobs Net Worth

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was born on February 24, 1955. During his early years, he was focused on creating the personal computer. In fact, his hand in the invention of the Apple and Apple II computers made him one of the youngest people to have ever been on the Forbes list of the richest people in the United States. However, how much is Jobs worth now (after his death)?

In 2011, when Jobs died, he was worth roughly $10.2 billion. The self-made man had certainly come a long way from the machine-building in his garage so many years ago. He had been rich from the early days of Apple though and he died a wealthy man.

During his first year working on the Apple personal computer, Steve Jobs earned an estimated net worth of $1 million. That was in 1978 when $1 million was a lot of money. He was only 23 years old and already a millionaire. Within the next year, that number grew to $10 million. By the age of 25 (only two years later), his net worth had grown to somewhere around $250 million. He is truly a success story.

What amazed people even more about Jobs’ story was that he was able to make it onto the Forbes list with absolutely no inherited money. He made every cent that he had with his ideas and his products. By the early 2000s, his company had grown into something that he’d never imagined it would be.

Jobs could have also been much, much richer. During the early years of the company, he only held 26 percent stake in the company. Over the years, he sold much of his share (dwindling his shares to only 11 percent). Then, in 1985, he sold all of his shares of the company for about $130 million. If he’d kept to 26 percent of the company, those shares would be worth $162 billion today. That would make him worth more than Bill Gates and Carlos Slim combined.

Even though he sold all but one of his shares in 1985, Jobs was still very much involved. In 1997, he sold his NeXT software to Apple to receive 1.5 million shares of the company. He then became interim CEO of Apple and then CEO once again.

At the time of his death in 2011, Jobs had 5.5 million shares of the company. In fact, during that year, Apple surpassed Exxon Mobil as the largest company in the U.S. His shares on the day he died equated to $2.1 billion and the company he’d helped found was making about $355 billion every year. However, the majority of his net worth when he died didn’t come from his own company.

The majority of Jobs’ net worth at his time of death came from Walt Disney. Jobs had actually bought Lucasfilm’s computer graphics company which he later named Pixar. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 and Jobs was the company’s biggest shareholder at the time, owning $4.3 billion of Disney stock. His Disney stock was transferred to a trust which his wife now oversees. It has grown to about $19 billion since his death.

Photo: Flickr: Nick Webb