Steve Jobs was just 30 years old, wildly successful technocrat when it all came crashing down. After creating a personal computing revolution, he was forced out of the very empire that he helped build from the ground up.
"I was out -- and very publicly out," he recalled in a commencement speech at Stanford University. "What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating." He added, "I was a very public failure."
But it worked well for Steve Jobs and his legacy. Getting fired gave him the opportunity to work on other things, like creating NeXT, a computer company that catered to the business crowd as well as a division of Lucasfilm's computer graphics division which later became Pixar. He later returned to Apple to herald the creation of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
