Claim: Apple's founder was Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul Jobs -LRB- -LSB- ˈdʒɒbz -RSB- February 24 , 1955 -- October 5 , 2011 -RRB- was an American entrepreneur , businessman , inventor , and industrial designer . He was the co-founder , chairman , and chief executive officer -LRB- CEO -RRB- 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 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 .   Jobs was born in San Francisco to Syrian parents who had to put him up for adoption at birth ; he was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s . Jobs briefly attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out . He then decided to travel through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism . Jobs 's declassified FBI report stated that an acquaintance knew that Jobs had used the illegal drugs 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 .   Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak 's Apple I personal computer . The visionaries gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II , one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers . In 1979 , after a tour of PARC , Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto , which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface -LRB- GUI -RRB- . This led to development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983 , followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984 . In addition to being the first mass-produced computer with a GUI , the Macintosh introduced the sudden rise of the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter , the first laser printer to feature vector graphics . Following a long power struggle , Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 .   After leaving Apple , Jobs took a few of its members with him to found NeXT , a computer platform development company specializing in state-of-the-art computers for higher-education and business markets . In addition , Jobs helped to initiate the development of the visual effects industry when he funded the spinout of the computer graphics division of George Lucas 's Lucasfilm in 1986 . The new company , Pixar , would eventually produce the first fully computer-animated film , Toy Story -- an event made possible in part because of Jobs 's financial support .   In 1997 , Apple merged with NeXT . Within a few months of the merger , Jobs became CEO of his former company , reviving Apple at the verge of bankruptcy . Beginning in 1997 with the `` Think different '' advertising campaign , Jobs worked closely with designer Jonathan Ive to develop a line of products that would have larger cultural ramifications : the iMac , iTunes and iTunes Store , Apple Store , iPod , iPhone , App Store , and the iPad . Mac OS was also revamped into OS X -LRB- renamed `` macOS '' in 2016 -RRB- , based on NeXT 's NeXTSTEP platform .   Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003 and died on October 5 , 2011 , of respiratory arrest related to the tumor .