• It's Official-ish: Teens Totally Admire Steve Jobs More Than Mark Zuckerberg

    Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    When asked which entrepreneur teenagers admire most, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs reigns supreme according to the 2010 Junior Achievement Teens and Entrepreneurship survey (PDF), leaving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the dust.

    Junior Achievement surveyed 1,000 teens in the United States by telephone to get an idea of which entrepreneurs they admire most. Nearly a quarter of respondents (23 percent) named Jobs as the most admired entrepreneur, albeit down from 35 percent in the 2009 survey.

    Even with Facebook at more than half a billion users, and the movie The Social Network taking the world by storm, Mark Zuckerberg only received nine percent of votes for most admired entrepreneur, tying with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Teens apparently admire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (17 percent), Oprah Winfrey (14 percent) and Jay-Z (13 percent) more than Facebook’s founder and CEO.

    Of course, the persons beating Zuckerberg out, including Jobs, have been in the game much longer and thus have careers filled with accomplishments, while Zuckerberg is just getting started. He could totally beat Hawk next year if he hones his skateboarding skills, too.

    When asked which qualities the surveyed teens admire most in these entrepreneurs, wealth and fame earned only 10 percent of their votes. Thirty-one percent of teens admire entrepreneurs who “make a difference in people’s lives” and 31 percent cited “success in multiple fields” as what makes an entrepreneur stand out.

    When asked what their incentive for becoming an entrepreneur would be, teens said “doing good” was only the third-ranked response at 15 percent. Topping that was “working for yourself” at 27 percent and “controlling your destiny” at 24 percent.

    If you’d like to learn more about the survey, such as the differences between responses from boys and girls, you can read the press release.

    Person: Steve Jobs
    Companies: Apple, Pixar, NeXT

    Steve Jobs was the co-founder and CEO of Apple and formerly Pixar. Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California to Joanne Simpson and a Syrian father. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California then adopted him. In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. One semester later, he had dropped out, later taking up the study of philosophy and foreign cultures. Steve Jobs had a deep-seated interest in...

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    Person: Mark Zuckerberg
    Companies: Facebook

    Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, which he started in his college dorm room in 2004 with roomates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for Facebook. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Earlier in life, Zuckerberg developed a music recommendation system called Synapse and a peer-to-peer client called Wirehog. However, he abandoned both to pursue new projects. Zuckerberg...

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