President Joe Biden will present a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple, in a ceremony on July 7, the White House announced today. Jobs will be one of 17 recipients.
The Presidential Medal of Honor is the United States' highest civilian honor, which the White House describes as being "presented to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors."
Jobs will receive the honor for his role as co-founder, CEO and chair of Apple Inc., as well as his time at Pixar and the Walt Disney Company. The White House's announcement reads that Jobs' "vision, imagination and creativity led to inventions that have, and continue to, change the way the world communicates, as well as transforming the computer, music, film and wireless industries."
Jobs co-founded in Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, creating wildly popular computers with the Mac lineup; making an incredibly popular music player with the iPod; and changing the smartphone landscape with the iPhone. He passed away in 2011.
The award will be presented alongside 16 other recipients, including actor and director Denzel Washington; Olympic gymnast Simone Biles; former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; and Sandra Lindsay, a New York critical care nurse and the first American to receive a COVID-19 vaccine outside clinical trials. The full list can be found here.
Jobs is the latest in a line of tech innovators to receive the honor. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Bill Gates the Medal of Freedom alongside his former wife, Melinda French Gates, though that award focused primarily on their philanthropic efforts. Grace Hopper received a posthumous award that same year for her work on making coding languages "more practical and accessible" and her work programming the Harvard Mark I computer during the second World War.
