One of Steve Jobs’ Job Applications Just Sold for Over $200,000, Giving Us a Glimpse into the CEO’s Past

We’ve heard some pretty crazy stories about Apple memorabilia going for very high prices, but now it looks like something penned by Apple’s legendary co-founder himself has just fetched a record price.

In a recent bid at London-based auction house Charterfields, a 1973 job application hand-written and signed by Jobs just sold for £162,000 (~$222,400), making it the most expensive item yet to bear the signature of the former Apple CEO.

While serious vintage Apple hardware has fetched much higher amounts, with some original Apple-1 computers going for close to $1 million, other collectible pieces of Apple history typically sell for much less. For example, a Fortune magazine autographed by Jobs only fetched $11,000 at auction.

On the other hand, a set of handwritten schematics for the original Apple-1 by Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Wozniak, sold for a little over $630,000. However, these were 23 pages of original documents not only hand-penned by Woz himself, but also encompassing much of the thinking and design behind the first-ever prototype Apple computer.

Likewise, Jobs’ job application (say that three times fast), comes from 1973 — an era that predates the existence of Apple in any form by about 2–3 years, when the entrepreneur would have been just over 18 years old. It not only bears Jobs’ signature but was also filled in with his handwriting, listing his address as “Reed College,” his major as “English lit,” and phone number as “none.”

The timing suggests that it would have been filled out around the time that Jobs dropped out of — or was about to drop out of — Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and about a year before he began a brief stint at Atari before ultimately founding Apple with Woz in 1976.

Jobs also listed his special abilities and interests as “electronics tech or design engineer — digital,” while identifying skills in computer and calculator design, leaving past employment lines empty, although that’s not all that surprising, considering his age at the time.

He did mention Hewlett-Packard, however, where he had his first internship in his early high school years. In a 1994 interview, Jobs shares how he called up Bill Hewlett when he was 12 years old, at his home number that was actually listed in the Palo Alto phone book, asking for parts to build a frequency counter.

He laughed and gave me the spare parts to build the frequency counter, and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard, working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters. He got me a job in the place that build them, and I was in heaven.

Steve Jobs

Notably, “the other Steve” — Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak — came from Hewlett-Packard to join Jobs in founding Apple in 1976. However, the two didn’t actually meet at HP; they actually met in 1971 when a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced them after telling Woz that he should meet Jobs because he was also into electronics and practical jokes. Fernandez later became the fourth employee to join the fledgling Apple, and helped to design the Apple 1.

Under the question about whether he had transportation, he acknowledged that he had a driver’s license, but listed access to transportation as “possible, but not probable,” — an entry that’s worth a chuckle or two considering that Jobs would later own a 2000 BMW Z8 that fetched $400,000 in a 2017 auction.

This actually isn’t the first time this same piece of paper has been on the auction block. It last surfaced at an auction back in 2018, where it was only expected to fetch $50,000, but ended up going for $174,757.28.