The Funeral and Casket Details of Steve Jobs

Introduction

Steve Jobs died on Wednesday 5 October 2011 at his home in Palo Alto, California. He was 56. Six weeks earlier he had resigned as chief executive of Apple, the company he had started in his parents' garage at 21 and come back to rescue at 41, and that resignation letter was the clearest signal the public ever got of how little time he had left.

What followed was one of the most widely mourned deaths of the decade and also one of the quietest burials. There was a small private ceremony within days, an unmarked grave in a Palo Alto cemetery, and then two large memorials held afterwards by his family and his company. Here is what is on the record about his funeral, and why there is nothing to report about his casket.

The Life and Legacy of Steve Jobs

He was born Steven Paul Jobs in San Francisco on 24 February 1955 and adopted as a baby by Paul Jobs, a machinist, and Clara Jobs, an accountant, who raised him in Los Altos. He dropped out of college, and in 1976 he and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer in the family garage. The work was recognised early. On 19 February 1985 President Reagan presented the two of them with a National Technology Award in the East Room of the White House, and the citation named them both for Apple Computer. Later that year Jobs lost a power struggle with the executives running the company he had founded and left it altogether.

The twelve years away made him. He started the computer company NeXT, and he bought the small graphics division that became Pixar, which went on to become part of the Walt Disney Company. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and he stepped back in as interim chief in 1997, with the company close to collapse. What came next is the part everyone remembers: the iMac in 1998, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. He resigned as chief executive on 24 August 2011, writing that he could no longer meet his duties and expectations in the role, stayed on as chairman, and handed the company to Tim Cook.

The News of Steve Jobs's Passing

Apple announced the death on 5 October 2011 in a short statement that said the company was deeply saddened, and in its own tribute it called him a visionary and creative genius. No cause was given at the time.

The cause came five days later, when the Santa Clara County public health department released the death certificate. It recorded the immediate cause as respiratory arrest, with a metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumour that the document said had been present for about five years. He died at home in the middle of the afternoon. Forbes, CBS News, ABC7 News and NBC Bay Area all reported the certificate's wording in the same terms.

The Funeral Arrangements for Steve Jobs

The burial happened in the days immediately after he died, in a private ceremony at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, a non-denominational cemetery a short drive from the house where he had lived and died. The death certificate named the cemetery, which is how reporters found it. Nobody outside the family was told it was happening, no funeral home was ever publicly named, and there was no viewing and no public procession.

The grave carries no marker, and the cemetery will not say where it is. That was the family's request and it has held for well over a decade. Visitors still come looking, from Japan, Russia and Brazil among other places, and the cemetery keeps a memorial book in its lobby for them to write in instead. Staff have said that nobody has come close to finding the plot.

The Casket Details of Steve Jobs

No casket maker, model, timber, finish or interior has ever been made public. With a burial arranged privately by the family and no viewing of any kind, there was no moment at which anyone outside that small group would have seen it, and no outlet has ever reported a detail about it.

It is worth saying what that silence does and does not mean. Some families release a great deal, as Aretha Franklin's did when her gold plated bronze casket was photographed at three public viewings in Detroit. Others release nothing at all, which is the choice the Jobs family made and also the one Tina Turner's family made in Switzerland in 2023. Our guide to the casket types well known families choose covers the materials and construction involved, and our caskets collection shows the range a burial like his would have been chosen from.

Attendees and Eulogies

The gathering people think of as his funeral was not the burial but the memorial service held on Sunday 16 October 2011 at Memorial Church on the Stanford University campus. It was invitation only, in a chapel that seats more than a thousand, and it was guarded closely enough that steel barriers went up around parts of the campus and Larry Page was briefly turned away for forgetting his invitation. A reception followed at the university museum, with candles lining the path between the two buildings. Reported attendees included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Tim Cook, Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Ive, John Lasseter, Yo Yo Ma, Joan Baez, Bono, Stephen Fry, Maria Shriver and Governor Jerry Brown, alongside his widow Laurene Powell Jobs.

The eulogy that the world eventually read was given by his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. She spoke about the brother she had found as an adult, about his working life and about his last hours, and two weeks later the New York Times published her words in full on 30 October 2011. It is the fullest account of that service that anyone in the room has made public.

The Impact on Fans and the Industry

California marked the day of the Stanford service officially. Governor Jerry Brown announced that 16 October 2011 would be Steve Jobs Day across the state, a decision he made public in a message posted two days beforehand and one that few private citizens have ever received.

Apple held its own farewell on Wednesday 19 October 2011, at ten in the morning, in the outdoor amphitheatre at the centre of its headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. Thousands of employees filled the courtyard and the service was carried to the rest of the company around the world, while Apple closed its retail stores for several hours and hung curtains across the windows so that shop staff could watch too. Coldplay and Norah Jones performed. Tim Cook spoke, as did Jonathan Ive, Al Gore and the board member Bill Campbell, and Laurene Powell Jobs joined the gathering. Apple later posted the video of it on its own site so that anyone could see it.

Legacy and Remembering Steve Jobs

There is no headstone to stand in front of and no plaque at the cemetery gate, so the remembering happens elsewhere. It happens in the products, which is the obvious part, and in Pixar, and in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005 that is quoted more often now than any keynote he ever delivered. For a man who had spent his working life controlling how things were presented, leaving nothing at all to look at was a consistent final choice.

The pattern of a private burial followed by a large public memorial is a common one among people whose families want both things. Alex Trebek, who died of the same kind of cancer nine years later, went further and had no service at all, while Harry Belafonte's family took the opposite approach entirely.

Conclusion

Steve Jobs had years of warning and he used them. He finished the work he wanted to finish, wrote a resignation letter in his own words six weeks before the end, and left his family with a burial so simple that it took journalists reading a death certificate to find out where it had happened. The unmarked grave was not an oversight. It was the last design decision of a man who cared a great deal about what things looked like.

Most people do not get that kind of notice. Writing down your funeral wishes or pre-planning a casket while nothing is wrong is what spares the people you love from guessing at the worst possible moment. You can read more farewells in our celebrity caskets and funerals collection.

Sources

• Forbes, "Steve Jobs' Death Certificate Reveals His Final Resting Place", 11 October 2011
• CBS News / Associated Press, "Jobs' death caused by respiratory arrest, cancer", 10 October 2011
• ABC7 News, "Steve Jobs died of respiratory arrest, cancer", October 2011
• NBC Bay Area, "Jobs Death Certificate Lists Cause of Death", 10 October 2011
• NBC Bay Area, "Steve Jobs' Unmarked Grave Becomes Holy Grail", 20 October 2015
• CBS News San Francisco, "Despite Unmarked Grave, Steve Jobs Fans Continue Searching Palo Alto Cemetery"
• 9to5Mac, "Steve Jobs laid to rest in Alta Mesa Memorial Park", 11 October 2011
• The Hollywood Reporter, "Steve Jobs Remembered at Private Memorial Service at Stanford University", October 2011
• Fortune, "Who attended the memorial service for Steve Jobs", 17 October 2011
• AppleInsider, "Celebrities, CEOs and a former president attended Steve Jobs memorial", 17 October 2011
• The Register, "High security at Steve Jobs memorial", 17 October 2011
• The Globe and Mail, "Sister reveals Steve Jobs's final words", October 2011
• University World News, "US: A sister's eulogy for Steve Jobs", 4 November 2011
• Forbes, "Apple Employees, Coldplay, Norah Jones, Say Goodbye To Steve Jobs", 19 October 2011
• Deseret News / Associated Press, "Apple employees celebrate Jobs, stores close", 19 October 2011
• Fox News, "California Governor Declares Oct. 16 'Steve Jobs Day'", 15 October 2011
• MPR News / Associated Press, "Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies", 5 October 2011
• UPI, "Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies at 56", 5 October 2011
• Voice of America, "Apple's Technology Icon Steve Jobs Dead at 56", 6 October 2011
• Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (official), "Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the National Technology Awards", 19 February 1985