In December 1980, Steve Jobs was four days away from becoming one of the wealthiest young men in America. In a California courthouse, his lawyers were rushing to close a file before that date arrived. The file had a child’s name on it: Lisa. Lisa Brennan was born on May 17, 1978, on a farm in Oregon, a commune called All One Farm, where a loose group of friends grew vegetables and tried to live simply.
Her mother, Chrisann Brennan, was 23. Steve Jobs, also 23, arrived three days later. Apple was two years old, and the Apple II had just launched the year before, becoming the first genuinely successful personal computer in America. He was a young man in a hurry, and a baby in a field in Oregon was not on the schedule.
But he came, and together the two of them picked a name. Then he went back to California. For the next three years, he told anyone who asked that the child wasn’t his. Chrisann raised her daughter on her own, cleaning houses, waitressing, taking odd jobs.
There were stretches when she and Lisa lived in single rented rooms in other people’s homes, moving again a few months later when the arrangement fell through. By Lisa’s own count in her memoir years later, she and her mother moved about thirteen times before she was out of grade school. For part of that time, they were on public assistance, the state of California effectively helping to support the daughter of a man whose company was about to become one of the most valuable in the country. It wasn’t that Jobs was distant or bad at staying in touch.
He actively denied the child existed. In 1980, the District Attorney of San Mateo County sued him for child support. His response, under oath in a deposition, was to swear he could not have fathered a child and to name a different man as the likely father. DNA testing was brand new.
Lisa was required to take one. The results gave a match probability of 94. 4 percent, essentially the ceiling of what the technology could measure. The court ordered him to repay the welfare money the state had spent, pay $385 a month in child support, and keep the girl on medical insurance until she turned 18.
He voluntarily raised the monthly payment to $500. The case was finalized on December 8, 1980. Four days later, Apple Computer went public in the largest initial public offering since Ford Motor Company in 1956. By the end of that day, Steve Jobs was worth more than $200 million on paper at the age of 25.
His lawyers had been pressing to settle before the offering. If they hadn’t, the numbers on that support order would have looked very different. Not long after the case closed, he drove to the little rented place in Menlo Park where Chrisann and Lisa were living. It was the first time the child had seen him since she was a newborn.
He asked the three-year-old if she knew who he was. She didn’t. He told her. She would spend the next thirty years trying to work out what that sentence had meant.
In 1983, Apple released a computer called the Lisa. It cost nearly $10,000. It had a graphical interface, a mouse, folders, and icons on a screen. It was ahead of its time and a commercial disaster, partly because Jobs had abandoned the project to run the Macintosh team and then competed directly against it.
Thousands of unsold units were eventually buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah. Apple’s official position, repeated for years, was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture. Engineers joked openly that the acronym had been reverse-engineered to fit a name somebody at the top had already chosen. Jobs himself denied in interviews and in private that it had anything to do with a child.
Decades later, on a trip to France, he was having dinner with the musician Bono, who asked directly whether the computer had been named after his daughter. Lisa was there. And this time, with a shrug, Jobs said yes. By the time Lisa was seven or eight, he was in her life in a strange, intermittent way.
He would appear, take her roller skating, then disappear for months. When she was nine, he formally acknowledged her, and her name on her birth certificate was changed at her request from Brennan to Brennan-Jobs. That hyphen mattered enormously to her. She wrote later about the house he lived in during those years, a huge, mostly empty mansion in Woodside with almost no furniture because nothing he’d found was good enough.
She described asking him about a Porsche parked outside and being told flatly that she was getting nothing. She described watching him in Hawaii hold out a piece of bread to a parrot again and again, pulling it back each time the bird lunged for it. When she was 14, the arrangement changed. She moved into his house in Palo Alto, where he now lived with his wife, Laurene Powell.
She had hoped this would be the version of him she’d been waiting for. She was asked to cut contact with her mother for a period of months, to take his surname, and to help with her younger brother. In a counseling session with her father and stepmother, she told them she was lonely, that nobody in the house said goodnight to her, that nobody came into her room. Her stepmother answered that they were simply cold people.
In 1996, Lisa left for college at Harvard. Her father took it badly, experienced her leaving as a rejection, and withdrew. There were long stretches during her college years when he simply didn’t speak to her. At one point, he stopped paying her tuition.
A neighbor stepped in: Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh engineers, who had known Jobs since the late 1970s and Lisa since she was small, lent her the money so she could stay enrolled. Jobs paid him back later. But somebody else had to notice first. A different childhood was happening under the same roof in the same decade.
Steve Jobs married Laurene Powell on March 18, 1991, in Yosemite National Park, in a tiny ceremony led by a Zen Buddhist teacher. Their son Reed Paul Jobs was born on September 22, 1991, six months later. Something in Steve Jobs changed. The man who could reduce an engineer to silence in a meeting would leave the building to be home for dinner.
The family kept the same ordinary-looking brick and timber house on a corner in Palo Alto, with no gate for years. Reed grew up looking remarkably like his father. The two of them took a trip to Japan together. They gardened.
They talked. When Jobs eventually gave Walter Isaacson access for the biography, he said plainly that his son was one of the great joys of his life. Lisa was 14 when Reed was born, living in the house. She wrote later that she loved her little brother genuinely and completely, and also that she watched, at close range, a version of fatherhood being performed a few feet away from her that she had never been offered.
In October 2003, during a routine scan, doctors found a tumor on Steve Jobs’s pancreas. It was a rare, slow-growing type, one of the treatable ones. Surgery was recommended immediately. Steve Jobs said no.
For nine months, he pursued alternatives: diet, juices, acupuncture, consultations with people outside conventional medicine. He finally had the surgery in July 2004. By then, according to the medical accounts that emerged later, the cancer had spread. He never said publicly that he regretted the delay, but people close to him said he did, more than once in private.
There was also a middle child. Erin Sienna Jobs was born on August 19, 1995. She has given no interviews and has no social media presence under her own name. She has reportedly studied architecture and design and has at times gone by her mother’s surname, Erin Powell.
In the authorized biography, her father described her as quiet, thoughtful, and self-contained, a serious child who didn’t get as much of him as she should have. He said he wished he’d been a better father to her. There was a plan for Erin to go to Japan, as Reed had, and the plan fell through. He eventually took her to Kyoto in 2010.
There are photographs of the two of them there, in the last full year of his life. She was eight when the tumor was found, 13 when her father had the transplant in Memphis, 16 when he died. She has never written a word about it. The youngest, Eve Jobs, was born on July 9, 1998.
By every account, she ran the place. Her father described her as a force, with a stronger will than almost anyone he’d ever met, and predicted, only half joking, that she’d end up running Apple one day. What Eve wanted was horses. She started show jumping seriously as a child and was genuinely good, competing on the international junior circuit.
Her father bought her horses and went to watch her ride when he was well enough to travel. She went to Stanford and graduated in 2021. In March 2022, she signed with DNA Model Management in New York and walked for Coperni and Louis Vuitton. On July 26, 2025, she married Harry Charles, a British show jumper and Olympic gold medalist, at a church in the Cotswolds.
The village went into lockdown for the wedding. Guests reportedly included Kamala Harris, Princess Beatrice, one of Bill Gates’s daughters, and Elton John. The reporting from that weekend contained one careful sentence: it was unclear whether Lisa Brennan-Jobs would attend. By 2009, the cancer had moved into Jobs’s liver.
He took a medical leave from Apple in January and received a liver transplant in Memphis in March. He came back to work that June and launched the iPad in January 2010. Inside the family, the arithmetic had become simple. He wanted to see his son graduate from high school.
Reed’s graduation was in June 2010, and he made it. He resigned as CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011. In the final weeks, the house in Palo Alto became the center of everything. His wife, his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, and his three younger children were there.
And Lisa came. Near the end, he told her he owed her an apology. He told her he had not been there. He said, more than once and to more than one person, that the way he had handled her as a child was among the things he regretted most in his life.
Steve Jobs died at home on October 5, 2011. He was 56. All four of his children were in the house. The estate ran into the billions.
Nearly all of it went to his wife. Laurene Powell Jobs said in an interview in 2020 that she was not interested in building a dynasty and intended for the fortune to be given away rather than passed down. Reed Jobs went to Stanford intending to become a doctor. He had started working in an oncology lab at 15 while his father was ill.
After his father died, continuing on that path became too painful. He switched his major to history. In August 2023, at 31, he spun his mother’s health investing work out into his own venture fund, named Yosemite after the park where his parents were married. It launched with $200 million backed by MIT, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Rockefeller University, and the venture capitalist John Doerr.
It invests in early-stage cancer therapeutics and diagnostics. The fund has since grown past $300 million. In September 2018, Lisa Brennan-Jobs published a memoir, Small Fry, a nickname her father had for her when she was little. It refused to take a side.
She wrote about the denial and the deposition, the empty mansion, the parrot, the Porsche, the cold answer in the counseling session, the tuition. She also wrote about roller skating, about a father who could be funny and strange and completely present when he chose to be. The family’s response was a short joint statement saying the portrait did not match the man they had known. She has said she was worried readers would come away hating him, and that was never what she’d been trying to build.
She described the book as a love letter that happened to contain the truth. Steve Jobs was adopted, born in San Francisco in February 1955 to two graduate students who were not married, given up within weeks, and raised by a machinist and a bookkeeper in Mountain View. He was marked permanently by having been handed over at the start. He was 23 when a young woman told him she was pregnant and said it wasn’t his.
The four children ended up in very different places. Reed spends his professional life trying to solve the disease that took his father. Erin has taken total privacy and made it her entire adult life. Eve has built a public career in two demanding fields on her own terms.
And Lisa is the only one who has told the story in her own voice at length, with her own name on the cover. She has said she is not sure the trade was worth it, and she has also said she would not undo it.