Steve Jobs

Early life and education

Steven Paul Jobs was born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco and was adopted as an infant by Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him in the area that would become Silicon Valley. His adoptive father, a machinist, exposed him early to electronics and to the idea of building things well. Jobs has been described as a precocious and headstrong child who was often bored by conventional schoolwork.

His biographer Walter Isaacson recounts an anecdote that a fourth-grade teacher, Imogene "Teddy" Hill, recognized his ability, motivated him with small rewards, and arranged for him to be tested - after which he reportedly scored at roughly a high-school grade level, prompting the school to consider skipping him ahead two grades. This is the source most often cited for his "high IQ," but it is a childhood school-testing story relayed decades later, not a documented adult IQ score with a named instrument.

Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland in 1972 but dropped out after one semester, continuing to audit classes - including a calligraphy course he later credited as an influence on Apple typography - before leaving. None of this educational record includes a published, named IQ score.

Companies and career

In 1976 Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The Apple II made the company a personal-computing pioneer, and the 1984 Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface and mouse. After a boardroom conflict, Jobs left Apple in 1985.

He then founded NeXT, whose hardware sold modestly but whose software (NeXTSTEP) became the technical foundation of later Apple operating systems. In 1986 he bought the computer-graphics division that became Pixar, which produced Toy Story (1995) and a run of hit films. Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company, where he oversaw the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad before stepping down as CEO in 2011. He died on October 5, 2011.

This record reflects exceptional product taste, focus, persuasion, and design judgment. It does not depend on, or reveal, any particular IQ figure.

The IQ question and where the number comes from

The figure of about 160 - and other figures clustered around 150 to 160 in different posts - appears widely on "celebrity IQ" list sites and social media. None of these sources cite a named test (Stanford-Binet, WAIS, Mensa-administered Cattell, etc.), a date, an examiner, or a documented administration. The numbers are presented without provenance, and the round 160 does not trace back to the one real anecdote on record.

That real anecdote - the Isaacson childhood school-testing story - is honest to report but limited: it describes a young child being placed at a higher grade level, not a normed adult IQ. Working from "scored above his grade as a kid" to "IQ 160 as an adult" is the standard celebrity-IQ move: list-makers reason backwards from achievements and a vague memory to a plausible-sounding round number. That reasoning is psychometrically invalid. IQ is a normed position relative to a population on a specific instrument; it cannot be inferred from a grade-skip story or a resume.

Jobs himself never claimed a specific IQ in any verifiable record. Absent a published, named, dated test result, the honest answer to "what is Steve Jobs's IQ" is: unknown - there is no measurement.

Why celebrity IQ numbers are usually wrong

Three recurring problems make figures like this unreliable:

• No instrument. A score has no meaning without the test it came from. A 160 on a high-ceiling research test is a different population position than a 160 on the WAIS-IV.
• No administration. Real scores come from a documented sitting: where, when, scored by whom. The Jobs figure has none of this - only a secondhand childhood anecdote.
• Reverse inference. Assigning an IQ based on someone being successful is circular - it assumes the conclusion (high ability) and dresses it up as a measurement.

For how real scores are produced and why they are not comparable across tests, see our methodology page and the historical IQ tests archive.

Frequently asked questions

Other modern figures