Remember that magazine Steve Jobs signed? Turns out it sold for $16,638.

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Steve Jobs Signed Fortune Magazine
Steve Jobs Signed Fortune Magazine (Image credit: Nate D. Sanders Auctions)

What you need to know

  • Steve Jobs signed a magazine in 1989.
  • He was on the cover of Fortune.
  • That magazine has now sold for almost $17,000.

Having something with Steve Jobs' signature on is a license to print money, it seems. We told you not too long ago about a magazine that had been signed by the Apple co-founder and was up for auction alongside a certificate of authenticity. Now that magazine has sold, raking in a cool $16,638.

Here's the story as described in the auction itself.

Steve Jobs signed ''Fortune'' magazine cover from its 9 October 1989 issue, published shortly after the launch of Jobs' new company NeXT, Inc. Jobs signs in black ink, ''To Terry / steve jobs'', with his characteristic lower case signature, next to a photo of the charismatic technology icon. The recipient, Terry, was one of Jobs' chauffeur drivers for several years before asking Jobs to sign this magazine, although Jobs subsequently called the limousine company to complain about the autograph request.

Interestingly, there were only three bids on this piece with the minimum bid being $11,000. It doesn't seem like there was a huge amount of interest in a copy of an October 2019 issue of Fortune, but that didn't stop it hitting the big numbers.

How much would you have paid for something like this? It would be a great conversation starter, but I'm not sure I could get even close to this kind of money. I wonder if they'd have swapped it for an old iPhone and some water-damaged AirPods.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.