00:00Steve Jobs is one of the richest men who ever lived, but the tips he gave about money did not
00:04sound like other billionaires. From the tip that says money should never be your goal,
00:08to holding your equity no matter what, to the one bet that quietly made him a billionaire,
00:12here are 15 lessons Steve Jobs gave about getting rich.
00:15Do not chase money as the main goal
00:18The first thing Steve Jobs wanted people to understand is that he never did it for the
00:22money. In that 1995 interview, he explained that wealth was never the thing pulling him forward.
00:27What pulled him forward was the company itself, the talented people around him,
00:30the products they were building, and what those products would let everyday people do.
00:34That order mattered to him. Money sat at the very bottom of the list,
00:37almost like an afterthought. And because his attention stayed locked on the work,
00:40his choices kept bending toward making something great instead of grabbing quick cash. In his mind,
00:46the money was a result of the work, never the reason for it. Early wealth barely mattered to him.
00:51Then he said something that stops most people cold. He described his own rise with almost no
00:55emotion at all. In his words, he was worth over a million dollars when I was 23, and over 10
01:00million
01:00dollars when I was 24, and over 100 million dollars when I was 25. That money came from
01:05Apple's success with the Apple II and the company's 1980 public offering, where he held around 11% of
01:11the shares. But here is the strange part. He called those numbers unimportant. Most people rebuild their
01:15entire identity around sudden money. Jobs treated it like background noise while still in his mid-20s,
01:21his eyes already fixed on the next thing he wanted to build. Money is a tool, not the scorecard.
01:27So if money was not the scorecard, what was it? To Jobs, money was simply a tool. He put it
01:32plainly,
01:32saying money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest
01:36in ideas that don't have a short-term payback. In his framing, cash was not proof that you were
01:40smart or important. It was freedom. Freedom to chase long, risky bets that the market would normally
01:45kill before they had a chance. Years later, he lived this out completely. He poured tens of millions of his
01:50own
01:51while it was bleeding cash. And he later ran Apple on a $1 salary. The money was fuel, nothing more.
01:58Hold your equity and think long term. The fourth lesson is the one that quietly builds fortunes.
02:04Jobs said he never sold any stock because he believed the company would do very well over
02:08the long haul. This is more powerful than it sounds. When you hold your ownership through the
02:11growth years, you capture the full compounding of everything that success creates. When you sell early,
02:16you trade that explosive, exponential upside for a flat pile of cash today. Jeff hadn't built his
02:21whole article around this idea. The founders who keep real equity through the hard-growing phase
02:25usually end up dramatically richer and far more powerful than the ones who keep cashing out little
02:31pieces along the way. Focus on the business, not personal cash-outs. This is where jobs separates
02:37getting rich from getting really, really rich. Haddon lays out two roads a founder can walk. On the first
02:42road you keep taking money off the table in every funding round, so you feel rich earlier and sleep a
02:47little easier. On the second road you protect the health and growth of the business, accept less
02:51cash in your pocket for now, and hold a bigger slice of ownership. Jobs' early philosophy lived
02:55on that second road. And the difference between the two can be enormous, because equity left inside
03:00a winning company can multiply many times over, while early cash-outs permanently shrink your share
03:05of that win. Learn from the founder, who deluded himself.
03:09To show the cost of the wrong road, Haddon tells a story about a founder he does not name. This
03:15founder built a company that reached a valuation of around $300 million. Along the way, he kept
03:20pulling money out in one funding round after another. The cash did help the company grow, but not nearly
03:25as much as it could have, because a piece of it kept walking out the door. His ownership slowly shrank
03:30into the single digits. His day-to-day control disappeared. And in the end, he was left with
03:34what Haddon calls everlasting regret. Waking up to own a tiny slice of something that could have
03:39been worth so much more. Understand that even Jobs bent his own rule. Now for the twist most fans
03:46forget. Jobs' own path did not follow his advice in a straight line. After he was forced out of Apple
03:50in 1985, he sold almost every share he owned, keeping just a single one so he could still attend
03:55meetings and receive reports. The sale reportedly brought in around $100 million. On Apple alone,
04:00that decision was painfully expensive, since that same stake would later be worth a fortune
04:05many times larger. But that money became the seed for everything that came next. He used it to fund
04:10a new company called Nii XD, and to buy a small graphics division that almost nobody else believed in.
04:16Know that Pixar, not Apple, made him a billionaire. That small graphics division was Pixar, and it turned
04:22out to be the real engine of his fortune. Pixar struggled for years, and Jobs kept it alive by
04:27writing personal checks that some estimates put near $50 million. Then in 1995, Toy Story arrived,
04:32the company went public, and Jobs, who owned roughly 80%, became a billionaire on paper almost overnight.
04:38Eleven years later, Disney bought Pixar in an all-stock deal valued at about $7.4 billion,
04:44handing Jobs around 138 million Disney shares. When he died in 2011, that Disney stake made up the
04:49majority of his estimated $7 to $10 billion fortune. Apple was the smaller piece.
04:55Align your pay with the long game. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he made a choice that
05:00told everyone exactly where his mind was. He took a salary of $1 a year, just one. His real reward
05:06came
05:06through equity, through stock grants that grew to around 5.5 million Apple shares by the time he died.
05:11This structure tied his personal fortune directly to the long-term health of the company. If Apple thrived,
05:17he thrived. If it sank, so did he. It also sent a loud public message that he had not come
05:21back to
05:22squeeze cash out of Apple, but to rebuild something he genuinely loved. Fix the top line and the bottom
05:28line follows. Underneath all of this sat a simple rule about how businesses actually win. In a 1997
05:34CNBC interview, shortly after he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple, Jobs shared a lesson he had
05:39learned long before. He said that if you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will
05:42follow. By the top line, he meant the right strategy, the right people, and the right culture. Get those
05:47correct, and they produce the right products, marketing, and manufacturing. The money then
05:51shows up on its own. This belief drove one of his boldest moves, cutting around 70% of Apple's
05:56products, so the company could pour everything into a few great ones. Understand that focus means
06:02saying no. That brings us to focus, which Jobs treated almost like a religion. To him, focus was not
06:08simply choosing one thing to work on. Real focus, he taught, is the discipline of saying no to the
06:12hundred other good ideas so the few truly great ones can be built to perfection. Most people and
06:17most companies scatter their energy across too many things, and that scattering weakens everything
06:21they touch. Jobs did the opposite. That ruthless habit of cutting the merely good showed up again and
06:26again, and it is exactly what later gave the world the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
06:31Value Time Above Money For all his talk about wealth, Jobs believed something else was worth far more.
06:38Back in a 1985 Playboy interview, he said that his favorite things in life did not cost any money,
06:43and that the most precious resource any of us have is time. He came back to this idea for the
06:47rest of
06:47his life. Money, he understood, can be earned, lost, and earned all over again. Time cannot, you never get
06:53a single minute back. This view is a big reason he was willing to suffer through the brutal years at
06:57NEXT and Pixar, spending his time on work that mattered, instead of simply cashing out and walking away.
07:03Do not let money change you. Jobs also gave a quiet warning about what sudden wealth can
07:08do to a person. After Apple went public, he watched people around him transform. They bought flashy
07:12cars and bigger houses, and slowly their values seemed to shift along with their bank balances.
07:17Jobs made a deliberate decision not to follow them. He kept his life relatively simple, famous for his
07:22plain clothes and a modest home compared to what he could easily afford. He had already decided,
07:26by around age 25, that he would not let money rewrite who he was. Wealth, in his mind, should never
07:32be
07:32allowed to redefine your identity or your priorities. Love the work itself
07:37The 14th lesson is the fuel behind every other one. Jobs believe that great work, and the wealth
07:42that can follow it, demands genuine passion. Without real love for what you do, the endless
07:46difficulties of building something ambitious eventually become impossible to bear. He often
07:51told people to keep searching until they found work they truly loved, rather than settling for
07:55something comfortable. In his words, the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
07:59That love is what supplies the stubborn perseverance you need to survive the long,
08:04messy, winding road that finally compounds into something extraordinary. Remember the
08:09one's thread through all of it. So when you gather all 15 lessons together,
08:13one clear thread runs through every single one. Treat money as a byproduct and a tool,
08:17never as the goal. Obsess over creating real value for real people. Protect your ownership wherever you
08:21can. Invest for the long term, even when the payoff is slow to arrive. Tie your own success to the
08:26success of what you build, and guard your focus, your time, and your identity from the distortions
08:31that wealth can bring. Jobs' own journey, from early millions to a painful sale to a wild bet
08:35on Pixar, proves the point. The really, really rich outcome, comes from owning something excellent
08:40for a long time. Steve Jobs got rich by building the Apple II. He got really, really rich by refusing
08:45to treat money as the point, and by holding on to what he believed in long after most people would
08:50have sold. That is the difference he wanted us to see. If you had to start living just one of
08:53these 15
08:54lessons today, which one would it be? If this made you think, click on one of the cards on your
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