Late Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Jobs was a fiercely private man.
Few knew his immediate thoughts, let alone his personal politics. In fact, last year following his passing at the age of 56, many in the media covered his apparent disinterest in and distaste for politics.
“Steve Jobs was a world improver,” observed John Carney, a Senior Editor for CNBC.com. “Unlike many folks who strive to improve the world, however, he doesn’t seem to have believed that government was the path to improvement.”
“Jobs and Apple,” he added, “never really bought into the Washington game… he didn’t really try to change the world through politics.”
As it turns out, the world’s most profitable company never even formed a political action committee. But despite the non-political posturing of Steve Jobs in public, new details are emerging about his private ambitions. A new report from Bloomberg indicates that some of Steve Jobs’ final days were spent considering and developing winning mobile marketing strategies for the reelection of President Barack Obama.
“Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels,” Steve Jobs told Obama campaign chief Jim Messina – making an obvious reference to the Web and email. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels.”
“[Jobs] knew exactly where everything was going… He explained viral content and how our stuff could break out, how it had to be interesting and clean.”
Beyond his covert assistance to the Obama campaign, little else is known about Jobs’ politics. But as time passes and more insider details become public, perhaps the deeply held personal beliefs of technology’s most private person will become more and more transparent.
