He sat cross-legged on the bare wooden floor of a nearly empty living room, a single lamp beside him, a cup of tea in his hands, and nothing else around him except space. The photograph from the early 1980s made it look peaceful, even monk-like. The women who shared those rooms with him would remember it differently. A house without furniture was also a house without comfort, and the same emptiness that left rooms bare shaped the way Steve Jobs treated the people who loved him.

For decades, the women in his life would try to explain the boy they had known before the rest of the world ever heard his name. Some of them would speak with hatred in their voices. Most would speak with something far more complicated. In the summer of 1972, a seventeen-year-old boy moved into a small cabin in the hills above Los Altos, California, with the girl he loved.

His father told him not to go. He went anyway. The girl was Chrysanne Brennan, a year behind him at Homestead High School in Cupertino, a quiet, artistic girl with long hair and a dreamy, unhurried way of moving through the world. They had met that year through a short animated film project some students were working on, and within a few months they were inseparable.

It was a particular moment in that part of California. The orchards that had covered the Santa Clara Valley for generations were slowly giving way to office parks and electronics companies, but the place still carried the leftover glow of the 1960s. Teenagers read about Eastern spirituality, experimented with diet and meditation, and talked about enlightenment the way earlier generations had talked about football games and proms. Jobs was deeply drawn into all of it.

Chrysanne was too. His adoptive father, Paul Jobs, was a practical man who had spent his life working with his hands. He told his son plainly that he was not to move into the cabin. Steve went anyway.

Chrysanne spent her days painting and writing poetry while he played Bob Dylan records over and over and talked late into the night about books, music, and ideas that seemed far too large for a cabin with no money and no plan. They had almost nothing, and for a few warm months it did not seem to matter. She would later look back on that summer as one of the happiest times of her life. What she remembered most years later was how intense he was.

He could be funny and gentle, and he could be completely absorbing in conversation, but he also had a way of switching off without warning. One moment he would be the warmest person in the room. The next he would be cold and distant, as if she were a stranger who had wandered into his space. For a teenage girl it was confusing.

For a while, it was also part of the attraction. The summer in the cabin did not last. That autumn, Jobs left for Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a small, expensive liberal arts school his working-class adoptive parents could barely afford. He dropped out after one semester, stayed around campus for a while, sitting in on classes that interested him—including a calligraphy course he would later credit for the beautiful typefaces on the first Macintosh—and then drifted back to California.

He took a job at Atari, the video game company. He saved money and traveled to India in 1974 searching for spiritual answers, and came back with a shaved head and a newfound devotion to Zen Buddhism. Through all of it, Chrysanne drifted in and out of his life. They would come together, fall apart, and come back together again, the way young couples so often do when neither person is quite finished becoming who they are going to be.

By the time Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer on April 1st, 1976, building circuit boards in the Jobs family garage on Crist Drive in Los Altos, Chrysanne was once again somewhere in his orbit. She even did some work for the young company in its earliest days. For a brief stretch, it seemed possible that these two restless, searching young people might settle into something steady. But the following year, the two of them moved into a house together with one of Jobs’s closest friends.

And it was in that house, during the very months when Apple was starting to take off, that everything between them began to fall apart. In 1977, Apple was growing faster than anyone had expected. The Apple II, introduced that spring at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, was a genuine hit—a beige, friendly-looking machine that made personal computers feel like something a regular family might actually want. Money was beginning to arrive.

Investors were circling. Jobs, only twenty-two years old, was suddenly running a real company. That same year he rented a modest suburban house in Cupertino with his friend Daniel Kottke, who had traveled with him to India, and Chrysanne moved in too. The friends jokingly nicknamed the place Rancho Suburbia.

It was a bare, informal kind of household. Kottke slept in one part of the house and Jobs and Chrysanne shared the main bedroom, though by her account the relationship was by then rocky and uncertain. Not long afterward, Chrysanne discovered she was pregnant. She was twenty-three.

He was twenty-two. And from the moment she told him, by her own account and by the accounts of the people around them, Jobs withdrew. He did not sit down with her to talk about what they might do. He did not make plans.

He simply went quiet, and then he went cold. Kottke later said that Jobs barely discussed the pregnancy at all, as if refusing to talk about it might somehow make it go away. Chrysanne considered every option available to a young woman in her situation, including placing the baby for adoption. In the end she decided to keep the child.

And as her pregnancy progressed, Jobs began telling people something that would follow him for years. He said the baby wasn’t his. He suggested that Chrysanne had been with other men and that there was no way to know who the father might be. People who knew both of them found it hard to believe.

Chrysanne was devastated. She had been with him on and off for five years. She felt humiliated, abandoned, and erased, and she could not understand how a man who spoke so often about spirituality, about kindness and enlightenment, could look at her and deny something so obvious. Life at Rancho Suburbia became unbearable.

There were arguments, slammed doors, long silences. Eventually Chrysanne left. With very little money and nowhere obvious to go, she made her way north to a place that held its own strange connection to the man she was leaving behind. The place was called the All One Farm, a commune near Portland run by Robert Friedland, a charismatic former Reed College student who had been a major influence on Jobs during his college years.

Jobs himself had spent time there, pruning apple trees of all things, and some people later wondered whether that orchard had played some small part in the name he eventually gave his company. On May 17th, 1978, Chrysanne gave birth to a baby girl at the farm, assisted by friends, without a hospital or a doctor. Jobs was not there. He arrived a few days later.

What happened during that visit is one of the most quietly heartbreaking moments in the entire story. He held the baby. He helped choose her name. They settled on Lisa Nicole Brennan.

Her last name would be her mother’s, not his. And then, having spent a short time at the farm, Jobs went back to California and returned to his company, still insisting to anyone who asked that he was not the father. There was an irony in all of this that almost nobody understood at the time. Steve Jobs had himself been given up at birth.

He was born on February 24th, 1955, in San Francisco to two unmarried graduate students, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. Joanne’s father strongly disapproved of the relationship, and the baby was placed for adoption with Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and a bookkeeper who raised him with real love in a small house in the South Bay. His biological parents had both been twenty-three when he was born. When Lisa came into the world, Jobs was twenty-three as well.

He had known he was adopted since he was a small child, and by his own later admission, the feeling of having been abandoned never fully left him. Friends who knew him well believed it was one of the deepest wounds in his life. And yet here he was, at exactly the same age, turning his back on his own child in almost exactly the same way. Years later, when his biographer Walter Isaacson asked him about it, Jobs acknowledged that he simply had not wanted to be a father at that point in his life.

He said he regretted the way he had behaved, but that recognition was still a very long way off. In 1978 there was only a young mother with a newborn baby, no money, no support, and a man who refused to admit the child was his. Chrysanne did what she had to do. She came back to California, and with nowhere else to turn, she applied for government assistance.

That single ordinary decision would set off a legal fight that put Steve Jobs on the record in a way he could never take back. Back in the Bay Area, Chrysanne cleaned houses to make ends meet. She and baby Lisa lived in a series of small, cramped places in and around Menlo Park, often unsure where next month’s rent would come from. She received welfare, which in those years meant the county was paying to support a child whose father was at that exact moment helping run one of the fastest-growing companies in America.

The irony was not lost on the county. In 1979, the district attorney of San Mateo County filed a paternity suit against Jobs, seeking child support and repayment of the welfare money that had been spent supporting Lisa. Jobs fought it. He continued to insist that he was not the father.

In his formal response he went further, suggesting that he was sterile and could not have fathered a child at all. Chrysanne, already struggling, now had to watch the man she had loved deny her and their daughter in official court papers. The court ordered a paternity test. In those days, before modern DNA analysis became standard, these tests relied on comparing blood markers between parent and child.

The result came back with a probability of roughly 94 percent that Jobs was Lisa’s father, a figure that was considered strong evidence at the time. Even then he did not fully accept it. He argued that the number left room for doubt. But the court was not persuaded, and in late 1980 a settlement was reached.

Jobs agreed to pay $385 a month in child support and to reimburse the county more than $5,000 for the welfare payments it had made. He also agreed to provide health insurance for Lisa. To understand how small that amount was, it helps to know what happened only weeks later. On December 12th, 1980, Apple Computer went public.

It was one of the most anticipated stock offerings in American history, the biggest since the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. When the shares began trading, Steve Jobs, at twenty-five years old, became worth more than $200 million almost overnight. He was suddenly one of the richest young men in the country. Chrysanne was still cleaning houses.

She later said that the gap between his new life and hers felt almost unreal, as if they were living in two completely different worlds that happened to share the same few miles of California. Those early years were lonely ones for her. Friends from the old days had scattered—some into the new technology companies, some into communes and spiritual retreats, some simply into ordinary jobs and families. Chrysanne was raising a toddler on her own, painting when she could, and trying to hold on to a sense of who she was outside of being the woman Steve Jobs would not acknowledge.

Lisa would later remember the small apartments, the borrowed furniture, the way her mother could turn an empty room into something beautiful with a few scarves and a coat of paint. She would also remember sensing, even as a very young child, that her father was a powerful man somewhere nearby who did not come to see them. Meanwhile, the newspapers and magazines that celebrated the young millionaire rarely mentioned that he had a daughter at all. Many people assumed that once the court had spoken, once the money had come and the public spotlight had arrived, Jobs would soften.

Instead, a few years later, he would sit down with a reporter from one of the most widely read magazines in the world and say something about Chrysanne that she would never forget. By 1982, Steve Jobs was a celebrity. He had already appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and that year the magazine was preparing its famous year-end issue. Word spread inside Apple that Jobs might be named Time’s Man of the Year, an honor that would have placed the twenty-seven-year-old alongside presidents, popes, and world leaders.

A Time reporter named Michael Moritz spent weeks interviewing Jobs and the people around him. When the issue came out in January 1983, Jobs was devastated. Time had not named a man of the year at all. Instead, it had named the personal computer itself the Machine of the Year.

Jobs appeared inside the issue, not on the cover, in a long and often unflattering profile. And buried in that profile was a passage that Chrysanne and Lisa would carry for decades. Speaking about the paternity case, Jobs told the reporter that statistically a large share of the men in America could have been the girl’s father. He put a specific figure on it, suggesting that nearly a third of the male population of the United States might be responsible.

It was a cold, almost mathematical way of dismissing his own daughter, printed in one of the most widely read publications in the world. Lisa was four years old at the time. She would not read those words until she was much older. Chrysanne read them right away.

Friends said it felt like a public humiliation designed to make her look like someone who could not be trusted, at a moment when she was still struggling simply to keep a roof over their heads. And then there was the computer. That same month, January 1983, Apple introduced a new, expensive, and technically ambitious machine designed to bring a mouse and a graphical screen to business users. Its name was the Lisa.

Apple’s official explanation was that the name stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture, a phrase engineers seemed to have worked out after the fact. Inside the company, people quietly joked that it really meant something else entirely. Everyone understood that the project, started back in 1978, the same year his daughter was born, carried her name. For years Jobs denied that the computer had anything to do with her.

Lisa herself would later describe asking him about it as a child and being told no, flatly and without explanation. It was a strange thing to grow up with: a machine named after you, built by a father who would not say so out loud. The Lisa computer itself was a commercial failure. It cost nearly $10,000, sold poorly, and was soon overshadowed by the Macintosh, the project Jobs had taken over after being pushed off the Lisa team.

But the name stayed, and so did the questions it raised. By the mid-1980s, Jobs would begin to spend a little more time with his daughter. But the next woman to share his life would come to see a side of him that was, in some ways, even harder to live with than outright denial. Her name was Tina Redse.

She was a design consultant, striking and soft-spoken, and she came into his life in the middle of the 1980s during what may have been the most turbulent period of his career. In 1985, after a bitter boardroom struggle with John Sculley—the Pepsi executive Jobs himself had recruited to run Apple—Jobs was stripped of his responsibilities and effectively pushed out of the company he had co-founded. He was thirty years old. He sold almost all his Apple stock and started a new computer company called NeXT.

He also bought a struggling graphics division from the filmmaker George Lucas, which would later become Pixar. Through much of this upheaval, Tina was at his side. Jobs later told his biographer that she was the first person he had ever truly been in love with, and people who knew them in those years described a relationship of real tenderness. She lived with him for stretches at his house in Woodside, a huge old Spanish-style mansion that was famously almost empty of furniture because Jobs could never find pieces that met his standards.

But the same perfectionism that left rooms bare also shaped the way he treated people. Tina watched him be harsh and cutting with waiters, with employees, with almost anyone who disappointed him. At times that sharpness turned toward her too. He could be loving and attentive, and then suddenly cruel in a way that seemed to come from nowhere.

She stayed for years, hoping the gentler side of him would win out. She tried to understand it. She later described reading through a medical description of narcissistic personality disorder—a condition in which a person struggles to feel empathy and has an inflated sense of their own importance—and being struck by how closely it seemed to match him. She was careful not to diagnose him, but she said the description helped her make sense of years of confusion.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Jobs asked Tina to marry him. She said no. When she explained her decision years later, she described something that many people close to him would have recognized. She said she could not see herself as the wife of Steve Jobs the icon, that the public role would have been impossible for her.

But more than that, she said she simply could not tolerate his unkindness. She did not want to hurt him, but she also did not want to stand by and watch him hurt other people. Living with him, she said, had been painful and exhausting. Of all the women in his life, Tina may be the one whose words stung Jobs most, because he had loved her so openly.

And yet she did not describe hatred. She described heartbreak, and a kind of weariness that comes from loving someone who keeps hurting the people around him. Not every woman who loved Steve Jobs walked away bitter, however. In fact, a few of his former partners remembered him with real affection.

In the early 1980s, before Tina, Jobs dated Joan Baez. For a young man who had grown up worshiping Bob Dylan, there was something almost unbelievable about it. Baez had been one of the defining voices of the 1960s, a singer and activist who had marched in the civil rights movement and who had once been romantically involved with Dylan himself. She was fourteen years older than Jobs.

He was in his late twenties, she in her early forties, and the age difference did not seem to bother either of them. They spent about three years together, on and off. She later remembered him as sweet and funny, someone who could be generous and surprisingly sentimental. She also remembered moments that were quietly strange.

On one occasion, he took her into a Ralph Lauren store, pointed out a beautiful red dress, and told her she would look wonderful in it. Then he walked out without buying it, while picking up a few things for himself. Baez found it puzzling more than hurtful—a small glimpse into a man who could be thoughtful in his words and oddly absent in his actions. There was also Jennifer Egan, a student at the University of Pennsylvania whom Jobs dated in the mid-1980s, often flying across the country to see her.

Egan would go on to become a celebrated novelist and win the Pulitzer Prize. She recalled their long conversations about Buddhism and about whether it was possible to seek enlightenment while also building a business around selling people things they wanted. They argued about it often. Even so, she remembered him with real warmth, as someone who could be gentle and emotionally open.

What these women seem to have had in common is that they knew him briefly, at moments when no child was involved and when nothing permanent was being asked of him. With Baez and Egan, he could be the charming, curious, romantic version of himself. The difficulties seemed to arrive when someone needed him to stay, to commit, to put another person’s needs ahead of his own. And as the 1980s came to an end, a new woman would ask exactly that of him.

In October 1989, Jobs was invited to give a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In the audience, sitting near the front, was a young business student named Laurene Powell. She was smart, athletic, and confident, and she had grown up in New Jersey before working at Goldman Sachs. After the talk, Jobs went over to speak with her.

He had a business dinner scheduled that evening, and he was already walking to his car when he stopped, turned around, and went back to ask her to dinner instead. He later said that if it had been his last night on Earth, he would rather spend it with her than at a business meeting. But what came next was far messier. On New Year’s Day in 1990, Jobs proposed to Laurene.

Then almost immediately he went silent on the subject. For months he simply did not mention it again. Laurene, understandably confused, eventually moved out. Later that year she discovered she was pregnant.

Even then Jobs wavered. According to his biographer, during this stretch he was still thinking about Tina, still unsure. He reportedly went around asking friends which of the two women was more beautiful and which one he should marry. To the people he asked, it seemed like an astonishing question for a man in his position to be asking.

Eventually he made his choice. On March 18th, 1991, Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell were married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, in a small ceremony led by Kobun Chino Otogawa, the Zen teacher Jobs had followed for years. Their son Reed was born that September. Lisa was twelve years old at the time, still living with her mother.

Within a couple of years, she would be living under her father’s roof, trying to find out where she fit in a household that had begun without her. For a girl who had spent her early childhood waiting for him to visit, the idea of a father with a wife, a baby, and a settled home felt both hopeful and unsettling, like a door opening onto a room she was not sure she was allowed to enter. Laurene would stay with him for the rest of his life. She was the partner who finally made it work, by most accounts, because she was strong enough to push back and steady enough not to be thrown by his moods.

But marriage and a new family did not repair the past, and just a short time later, the daughter he had once denied came to live under the same roof. Lisa Brennan grew up moving between apartments and towns with her mother, sometimes switching schools, often short on money. Through her early childhood, her father was an occasional presence at best. When she was around eight or nine, he began dropping by more often.

Sometimes he would take her roller skating through the quiet streets of Palo Alto. She remembered those afternoons with a kind of aching gratitude, because they were among the few times he seemed to simply enjoy being with her. In 1986, Jobs also discovered something about his own family. After his adoptive mother Clara died that year, he searched for and found his biological mother, Joanne.

Through her, he learned that he had a younger sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. The two became close. Later, Mona would publish a novel called A Regular Guy, about a brilliant, self-absorbed Silicon Valley founder who largely ignores the daughter he had with a former girlfriend. Readers did not need much help guessing who had inspired it.

When Lisa was in her early teens, her relationship with her mother had become strained, and she moved into her father’s home in Palo Alto, where he now lived with Laurene and their young son. Years earlier, her father had finally added his name to hers, and she was now Lisa Brennan Jobs. For a girl who had spent her whole life on the edges of his world, it should have felt like coming home. In many ways, it did not.

Lisa would later describe a house that felt cold, both emotionally and at times literally. She has written that the heating in her bedroom did not work properly and that her father would not fix it. She asked him to say good night to her before bed, a small ordinary thing that children ask for, and she has written that he refused. She was also expected, by her account, to cut off contact with her mother for a stretch of time after moving in, something that left her deeply torn.

There were moments of real cruelty in her memories. Once, after she sprayed on a bit of rose-scented facial mist, he told her she smelled like a toilet. On another occasion, when she asked if she could have his Porsche someday when he was done with it, he told her plainly that she would not be getting anything from him. These were small moments on their own.

Taken together over years, they shaped the way she understood herself. She also described feeling like a guest in a family that already seemed complete without her. There was a new baby brother who received his parents’ full attention, and later two little sisters, Erin and Eve. Lisa was a teenager trying to find her place, sometimes asked to help with chores or babysitting, and often unsure whether she was wanted there at all.

She remembered sitting at the dinner table while conversations moved around her, and wondering whether anyone would notice if she simply stopped coming downstairs. Some adults outside the family did notice. A few neighbors and family friends quietly became a second home for her, places where she could talk freely and be treated like an ordinary, welcome kid. She was accepted to Harvard and went east in the mid-1990s.

While she was there, she and her father had a falling out, and he stopped paying her tuition. Neighbors from Palo Alto, a family who had grown fond of her, stepped in and paid for her schooling themselves. She graduated in 2000. For years afterward, father and daughter barely spoke.

By then, Steve Jobs had returned to Apple, rescued it from near collapse, and introduced the iMac and the iPod. He was becoming the most celebrated business figure of his generation. And the girl whose name had once been given to a failed computer was living a quiet life as a writer, carrying memories she had not yet shared with anyone. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

For a long time he kept the seriousness of his illness private, even as he grew visibly thinner on stage at Apple’s product launches. He introduced the iPhone in January 2007 and the iPad in 2010, both times appearing frailer than the time before. In 2009 he received a liver transplant in Tennessee. Something softened in him in those years, at least toward some of the people he had hurt.

Lisa and her father reconnected. She spent time with him during his final months, visiting the family home in Palo Alto. By her account, he began to say something to her again and again, almost like a refrain. He told her that he owed her one.

He did not offer a long speech or explanation, just those few words repeated, as if he knew there was a debt between them that could never be fully paid. She also described a moment during a dinner some years earlier when the musician Bono asked her father directly whether the Lisa computer had been named after her. After decades of denials, Jobs paused and admitted that it had. Lisa remembered the moment as both a relief and a small shock—a truth she had always suspected, finally said out loud, and not even to her, but to a guest at the table.

Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto on October 5th, 2011. He was fifty-six years old. Around the world, people left flowers and handwritten notes outside Apple stores. Tributes poured in from presidents, rival executives, and millions of ordinary people who had grown up with his products.

For the women who had known him privately, the mourning was more complicated. Just a few weeks after his death, Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography was published. Jobs had cooperated with it fully, sitting for dozens of interviews and encouraging the people in his life to speak honestly, even critically. For the first time, many readers learned about Chrysanne, the paternity case, and Tina’s refusal to marry him.

Jobs had told Isaacson that he wished he had handled those years differently, and that he had not been ready to be a father when Lisa was born. For Chrysanne, the book was not enough. She felt it still told the story mostly from his side, and that her own experience and Lisa’s had been squeezed into a few pages of a much larger legend. She decided to tell it herself.

In 2013, Chrysanne Brennan published a memoir called The Bite in the Apple. It told the story of their teenage romance, the cabin above Los Altos, the house in Cupertino, the pregnancy, the denial, and the long years of struggle that followed. She did not paint him as a monster. She described a gifted, searching young man she had genuinely loved.

But she also described someone whose coldness had left lasting damage on her and on their daughter. And she made it clear that she believed the world had never been told the whole story. Five years later, in 2018, Lisa published her own memoir, called Small Fry, a nickname her father had sometimes used for her. It was beautifully written and deeply personal, and it brought many of those private memories into the open for the first time: the cold bedroom, the refused good nights, the Porsche, the denials, the computer.

What surprised many readers was how much love ran through it. Lisa did not write in anger. She wrote with sadness, humor, and a stubborn tenderness toward a father who had so often failed her. She said she had forgiven him, and that she wanted to understand him rather than condemn him.

Members of Jobs’s family responded with a public statement, saying the book differed sharply from their own memories of those years. Others who had known the family supported Lisa’s account. As with so much in this story, the truth seemed to depend on where each person had been standing. It is easy, looking back across half a century, to reduce all of this to a single word: hatred.

But the women who knew Steve Jobs best rarely used that word themselves. Chrysanne felt betrayed, and she spent years fighting simply to be believed. Tina felt worn down by a love that kept turning sharp. Lisa felt invisible inside her own father’s house.

Joan Baez and Jennifer Egan remembered a charming young man who never had to stay long enough to disappoint them. And Laurene, who did stay, saw both sides of him for twenty years. What connects them is not a single act of cruelty, but a pattern. A man who could be dazzling, tender, and generous with his attention, and then at the moments that mattered most would turn away.

A man who had been given up as a baby, and who at twenty-three gave up his own child in almost the same way. A man who later admitted he wished he had done better, but who only found the words when there was very little time left to use them. Somewhere in the hills above Los Altos, the cabin where a seventeen-year-old boy and his girlfriend spent the summer of 1972 is long gone, or long forgotten. The records he played have been replaced by playlists, the computers he built by phones in every pocket.

But the people he loved and the people he hurt carried that summer with them for the rest of their lives, each trying in their own way to explain the boy they knew before the rest of the world ever heard his name.