May 17, 1978: Steve Jobs’ first child, a daughter named Lisa Brennan-Jobs, is born. The child of the 23-year-old Apple co-founder and his high school girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan, Lisa’s parents are no longer a couple when she comes into the world.
Several shameful years follow in which Jobs denies paternity of his daughter, before they eventually reconcile.
Steve Jobs denies paternity of newborn daughter
Lisa was born on Robert Friedland’s All One Farm commune outside of Portland, Oregon, where Jobs briefly worked. By the time she was born, Jobs had co-founded Apple Computer. He refused to acknowledge paternity of hi daughter, even after a blood test concluded that Jobs had a 94.4% chance of being the father.
With Apple still in its embryonic stages, Jobs agreed to pay $385 per month in child support. This figure increased to $500 per month after Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire. (He also covered Lisa’s health insurance.)
Eventually, Jobs matured and apologized for his past actions. He developed a strong relationship with his daughter. And when he passed away in 2011, he left Lisa Brennan-Jobs a multimillion-dollar inheritance.
Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, portrayed in biopic
Lisa was one of the only people who turned down writer Walter Isaacson for an interview for his 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.
However, she later shared her story with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who used it as the emotional throughline for his screen adaptation of Isaacson’s book. In the 2015 movie Steve Jobs, actresses Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo and Makenzie Moss portray Lisa at different ages.
Lisa went on to study at Harvard University, where she wrote for The Harvard Crimson. She’s since written for The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Advocate, Spiked, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine.
In 2018, she released a memoir entitled Small Fry about her early life. (Read our review: Small Fry offers complicated portrait of Steve Jobs as a father.)
Naming the Lisa computer after Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Photo: Auction Team Breker
For Apple fans, perhaps the best-known anecdote about Lisa Brennan-Jobs relates to the naming of the company’s ill-fated Lisa computer in 1983. At the time, Steve Jobs denied that he named the machine after his daughter. He was in the middle of a paternity lawsuit, and such an admission certainly would have hurt his case.
Instead, Jobs claimed that “Lisa” stood for “Local Integrated System Architecture.” Aware of the full story, some Apple engineers joked that the name should stand for “Let’s Invent Some Acronym” instead.
Eventually, Jobs admitted that he named the computer after Lisa, just as he admitted that she was, in fact, his daughter. In the official biography, Jobs told Isaacson, “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”
Today, only 30 to 100 of the original Lisas are thought to exist — which is why they go for good money at auction.
