FBI File Shocker: Steve Jobs Was a Willful, Mercurial Ex-Hippie and Computer Genius

FBI File Shocker: Steve Jobs Was a Willful, Mercurial Ex-Hippie and Computer Genius

February 9, 2012 at 9:00 am PT

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What did the FBI have on Steve Jobs? Not much according to its investigation of the late Apple founder and CEO’s background.
The agency just released its file on Jobs, compiled during a background check conducted in the 1990s when Jobs was being considered for a spot on a White House council on exports. And with the exception of a noteworthy nugget or two, it’s about as mundane as they come.
If you’ve read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs or, frankly any newspaper obituary of the man, then you’re already as well-informed on his life and peccadilloes as the FBI.
Put it this way: Among the highlights of agency’s 191-page dossier is the observation that Jobs was a former hippie. “During the late 1960s and early 1970s , Mr. Jobs may have experimented with illegal drugs, having come from that generation.”
A few others:

• Jobs had a tendency to “twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”
• Jobs underwent a “change in philosophy by participating in eastern and/or Indian mysticism and religion. This change apparently influenced his personal life for the better.”
• Jobs was “strongwilled, stubborn, hardworking and driven, which .. is why he is so successful.
• Jobs liked to get his way.
• Jobs did “an outstanding job in the computer industry.”

Really the FBI’s only discovery of note was that Jobs was inexplicably granted Top Secret security clearance by the Defnese Industrial Security Clearance Office between 1988 and 1990. Oddly, those credentials were issued by Pixar which may have done some government work around that time.
Beyond that? Not much. Had Isaacson written is biography of Jobs a few decades earlier, he would have saved the FBI a hell of a lot of work.
Below, the report in its entirety.