steve jobs built the most valuable company on earth while making choices about his own mortality and his own family that the official narrative still struggles to explain: october 2003. diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. rare, treatable, operable. he delayed surgery for 9 months while trying a fruitarian diet, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. he later told walter isaacson he believed the delay let the cancer spread… his biological father was abdulfattah jandali, a syrian graduate student in wisconsin. jandali later ran a reno restaurant where jobs dined multiple times without either of them knowing. he met his biological sister, novelist mona simpson, for the first time at age 30 paternity of his first daughter lisa was established in a 1980 court case with a 94.1% DNA match. jobs publicly denied for years that she was his. then named the apple lisa computer after her while still denying it he was fired from the company he founded in september 1985 at age 30. the CEO he had personally recruited from pepsi with the line "do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life" cast the decisive vote june 12 2005 at stanford he gave the commencement address. opened by announcing he had cancer. closed with "stay hungry, stay foolish." delivered 14 months after his first surgery. he never sounded sick march 21 2009. liver transplant at methodist university hospital in memphis. he waited in tennessee for a donor match because its transplant list was shorter than california's he parked his silver mercedes in handicapped spaces at the apple campus and drove without a license plate. leased an identical car every 6 months to exploit a california rule that gave new vehicles 6 months before plates were required he dropped out of reed college after one semester in 1972 but kept auditing classes. a calligraphy class he sat in on, years later, became every proportional-spaced font the macintosh shipped october 5 2011, palo alto. respiratory arrest, age 56. his sister mona simpson's eulogy reported his final words: "oh wow. oh wow. oh wow." the man who convinced a generation that design was how something worked made some of the most consequential choices of his own life against his own best interests. and the company he built kept going anyway. which steve jobs story still surprises you?