Steve Jobs’s daughter grew up on $385 a month while he said she wasn’t his. On his deathbed he kept telling her: I owe you one. Lisa was born in 1978 on a farm commune in Oregon. Her mother was Chrisann Brennan, Steve’s girlfriend. Steve said the baby wasn’t his. A DNA test put the probability that he was the father at 94.1%. A court ordered him to pay $385 a month and pay back the welfare her mother had been living on. Days later Apple went public. He was suddenly worth more than $200 million. In 1983 he still told Time magazine that 28% of the male population of the United States could be the father. That same year Apple released a computer called the Lisa. When she asked him if it was named after her, he said: nope, sorry, kid. Years later he told Bono it was. At 14 she moved in with him. He had one condition: she could not see her mother for six months. She asked once if she could have his Porsche when he was done with it. You’re not getting anything, he told her. Nothing. And yet, she says, there was love. She remembers a freezing night when he sat through her boyfriend’s school play without a sweater, because he knew how much it meant to her. At the very end, dying of cancer, he kept apologizing for the time they had missed. I owe you one, he kept saying. I’m so sorry. Did she forgive him? Not at the time. Now, in many ways, yes. We did like each other, she said. I wish there had been more time. He built one of the most valuable companies in the world. The one thing he couldn’t buy back was the years he spent saying she wasn’t his. Can success ever make up for the people you failed on the way? Follow me for more stories like this.