In an interview with "60 Minutes" on Sunday evening, Steve Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that the Apple founder actually did meet his biological father face-to-face once--even though neither man realized it at the time.
The intensely private Jobs sought out his biological mother and sister in the mid 1980s, saying that he felt something was missing from his life. He became very close with his biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. But he decided he didn't want to meet his father, Abdulfattah Jandali, who had left his mother when Mona was still young. (The couple gave Jobs up for adoption when they were both in graduate school.)
"I learned a little bit about him, and I didn't like what I learned," Jobs says in new audio recordings released by Isaacson. "I asked her to not tell him that we'd ever met and not tell him anything about me."
But it turns out they had already met, even though neither man realized it. When Mona Simpson tracked down Jandali, he told her about a restaurant he used to manage in Silicon Valley that was very popular. "Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to come there," he told her. "He was a great tipper." Simpson was shocked, but didn't reveal that Jobs was Jandali's son.
"I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria, and it was most certainly him, and I shook his hand and he shook my hand and that's all," Jobs told Isaacson.
Jandali, now 80, said he sent Jobs' birthday emails after he found out he was his father, and claims that one time he received a response that just said "Thank you."
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