Steve Jobs

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs told the story of a calligraphy class he took at Reed College after dropping out. He had no practical reason to take it, he said, but ten years later, when he designed the first Macintosh, the beautiful typography he had learned there went into the computer. His point was that you cannot connect the dots looking forward, only looking back.

He was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, at 7:15 in the evening, the time on his birth record. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs; his biological father was a Syrian-born graduate student, and his biological sister, whom he met as an adult, is the novelist Mona Simpson. His Sun is in Pisces in the sixth house of work and craft. Pisces is imaginative, intuitive and artistic, and the sixth house concerns daily work and skill. A Pisces Sun in the sixth describes someone who brings artistic vision to practical work, and Jobs's career was built on making technology beautiful and intuitive.

Virgo is his rising sign, the sign of perfectionism and attention to detail. Jobs was famous for obsessing over every detail of Apple's products, from the curves of a case to the inside of a circuit board that customers would never see.

Jupiter and Uranus, both in Cancer, occupy his tenth house, the zone of reputation. Uranus is the planet of innovation and sudden change, and Jupiter magnifies success. Together in the tenth they describe a career of dramatic breakthroughs and reversals. In 1976 he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak; in 1985 he was forced out of the company he had created; he returned in 1997 and led it through the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, which together transformed personal technology.

His Moon is in Aries in the seventh house of partnerships, with Mars at the very end of Aries in the eighth. Aries is combative and impatient, and the seventh house describes partners and rivals. Jobs's working relationships were famously intense and often volatile.

Mercury, retrograde in Aquarius, in his fifth house of creativity, describes an original, unconventional mind. Between his years at Apple, he founded NeXT and bought the computer graphics company that became Pixar, which made Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film.

Saturn in Scorpio, in his third house, and Pluto in Leo, in his twelfth, add intensity and hidden struggle. In 2003 he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He continued working through his illness and died on October 5, 2011, at fifty-six. The Pisces Sun gave him the vision; the Virgo Ascendant made him demand that every detail be perfect.