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The San Diego Union-Tribune

The quiet CEO

Understated Qualcomm founder retiring after a pioneering career in cell phone technology


June 26, 2005


SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune

"He loves it and it works well, so why change it?" said his youngest son, Jeff Jacobs.

The elder Jacobs is one of the richest men in the world, No. 406 on Forbes magazine's 2004 list, thanks to the phenomenal success of Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology company he helped found. He revolutionized cell phone communication around the world on the strength of a single idea.

Yet the trappings of wealth are largely lost on the 71-year-old billionaire. In many ways, Jacobs is still the same mild-mannered professor who urged his four children to turn off lights when leaving a room or to cut long-distance calls short to save money.

For Jacobs, money isn't about gaining status or power or fame. It's a tool for taking care of your family, your employees, your community.

This is a man who would tell you his most valuable asset isn't his 26 million shares of Qualcomm stock – worth a total of $938 million. It's his family: his wife, four sons and 11 grandchildren.

He gets more of a kick out of giving his money away to favorite causes (the symphony, local theater, universities) than he does spending it on himself.

And the unassuming engineer cherishes his old watch more than any fancy new one he could buy because his employees gave it to him. (It helps that it's a Rolex.)


Like many great success stories, Jacobs' climb to the top can be traced to a eureka moment. The thunderbolt that ultimately led to Qualcomm's success struck two decades ago on Interstate 5 while he was riding home from a business meeting in Los Angeles.

But it never would have happened had Jacobs taken the advice of his high school guidance counselor.

"There's no future in science or engineering," the counselor told the technology-minded Jacobs, who had been assembling contraptions out of milk bottles, lights and electric motors since he was 8. "Go into the hotel business."

SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune
Irwin Jacobs and his wife, Joan, have traveled the world and enjoy collecting modern art, but a healthy portion of their personal wealth has been spent to enhance the community. Among their gifts: $120 million to the San Diego Symphony and $110 million to UCSD.
For a while, he did.

Jacobs grew up in a working-class section of the historic whaling town of New Bedford, Mass., in the 1930s and '40s. He followed his sister to college, graduating from Cornell with a degree in electrical engineering on his way to an eventual Ph.D. from MIT.

Their father was a taxicab driver, an insurance salesman and an electrician's apprentice before buying a New England seafood restaurant.

The young Jacobs' strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit were already evident by the time he was a teenager. Jacobs worked as a clerk in his grandfather's butcher shop. A photography buff, he also earned money by developing film in a makeshift darkroom at his family's home. He later was a cook at a country club.

He entered Cornell's School of Hotel Administration before finding his true calling: engineering. Jacobs helped pay his way through college by working, at various times, as a waiter, a cook, a tester in a vacuum tube laboratory and an assistant to an industrial engineer.

In his sophomore year, he met Joan Klein on a date arranged by her roommate. For Joan, it was an instant match.

"He was very shy then," she recalled. "But he was good-looking and belonged to a fraternity and had a car. And he was a nice guy."

They married in 1954, after Joan graduated. She worked as a school dietitian while Irwin finished college.

After getting his doctorate, Jacobs became an assistant professor at MIT, where he wound up being a minor celebrity by co-authoring a textbook. To this day, "Principles of Communication Engineering" is considered the bible of digital communications.

In 1966, Jacobs turned down an invitation to teach communications and information theory at the new University of California campus in San Diego. But two days later, he got soaked in a Boston rainstorm as he waited for a bus.

He and Joan decided that night to move west.

After taking the UCSD job, Jacobs began dabbling as a consultant. He and two UCLA professors started a small consulting company in 1968 that thrived on government contracts for defense communications. It was called Linkabit, and when it grew from a few part-timers to more than 1,000 employees, Jacobs left academic life.

He made his first fortune, about $25 million, when Linkabit was sold in 1980.

"It was the first time we had any spare money," he said.

Jacobs stayed on with the new owners for five years before "retiring." He quickly grew restless and decided to start a new company; it was called Qualcomm.

Soon after came the thunderbolt.

Heading home from a consulting job in 1985, it dawned on him that an arcane technology used by the military in World War II for secure radio communications could be used for cell phones. He asked Qualcomm co-founder Klein Gilhousen, who was driving the car, to explore the idea.

Two days later, Jacobs inquired about the investigation.

"You mean you were serious?" Gilhousen asked.


Jacobs had started Qualcomm in his den with six other former Linkabit employees three months after his supposed retirement. For Jacobs, a workaholic by most accounts, Qualcomm was supposedly a sideline to keep himself busy.

Irwin Mark Jacobs

Chairman and chief executive, Qualcomm

Age: 71.

Education: Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Cornell University; master's and doctorate in electrical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Academic career: Assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, 1959-66. Co-author of "Principles of Communication Engineering," a textbook on digital communications, first published in 1965. Professor of computer science and engineering at UCSD, 1966-72.

Entrepreneurship: Co-founded communications consulting firm Linkabit, 1968. Sold Linkabit to M/A-Com, 1980. Retired from Linkabit, April 1, 1985.

Qualcomm highlights: Co-founded company with six former Linkabit employees July 1, 1985. Became chairman and CEO. Company introduced OmniTRACS tracking system for trucks, 1988. It demonstrated its cell phone technology to the industry in 1989 and introduced it commercially in 1995.

Personal: Lives in La Jolla. Married 50 years to Joan Klein Jacobs. Four sons, Gary, 48; Hal, 45; Paul, 42; Jeff, 39. Eleven grandchildren.

Net worth: $1.4 billion, as estimated by Forbes magazine in 2004.

Maybe the company would grow to 100 employees, he told Joan. Never did he dream that two decades later Qualcomm would employ 8,000 people, generate $5 billion in revenue a year and be the 75th most valuable global company on The Financial Times  rankings by market value in 2005.

Qualcomm's first employees set up shop in a La Jolla strip mall above a dry-cleaning shop and pizza parlor. The company had no tangible product, just its founders' knack for cracking tough wireless-communications problems.

Government and commercial consulting contracts kept Qualcomm afloat until it had its first real product: a satellite tracking system for truck fleets.

The system brought in enough money to bankroll Jacobs' idea of using military technology in cell phones.

Anyone else might have thought the project a waste of time. After all, the cell phone industry was well on its way to adopting another technology as its standard.

Jacobs persevered. He was adamant in his belief that this technology, called "code division multiple access," was superior to any other. It would allow 10 times more calls in the same amount of radio spectrum as the other technology being considered. It also would mean lower operating costs for wireless providers and cheaper phone calls for customers.

He shopped around the technology to cell phone company executives, who, out of respect for the former professor, listened politely to Jacobs' spiel.

Most of them summarily dismissed the idea. Others criticized Jacobs for pushing a competing method just as the industry was about to agree on a universal standard. Yet a few engineers were intrigued.

The turning point came in 1989 when Jacobs invited 250 or so cell phone executives to San Diego for a demonstration. Qualcomm engineers worked until all hours of the night to equip a van with a 30-pound box that simulated a cell phone.

But just as Jacobs was finishing his talk on the virtues of CDMA, an engineer signaled to the chief executive from the back of the room.

Jacobs got the unsettling message: Something has gone awry; keep talking. (The satellite signal had failed.) Depending on whom you talk to, Jacobs rambled on for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour before getting the sign to stop. Crisis averted. The demonstration was a rousing success.

Today, Qualcomm's technology is used on 282 million cell phones worldwide, about a fifth of all cell phones. And it has won the global war to become the preferred technology for the next generation of cell phones.

Jacobs' brainchild also is ushering in the era of surfing the Internet, playing games, watching TV, snapping photographs and making videos, all via cell phones.


Qualcomm's stock became a darling of Wall Street during the tech boom. On one day in 1999, Qualcomm shares went up $54 and closed at $195.

Jacobs, who had plowed much of his own money into the company to keep it going in the early years, made $148 million on paper that day.

Not only has he amassed a net worth over the years that Forbes  recently estimated to be $1.4 billion, he also has been hailed as a hero in the telecom field and as a leader in San Diego business.

File photo
Jacobs made his first fortune in 1980 when he sold Linkabit, a leading telecommunications company he founded. He stayed on for five years before leaving and founding Qualcomm.
"He used to get an entrepreneur-of-the-year award every week," said Steve Altman, incoming president of Qualcomm. "It got to be a joke."

The accolades came as no surprise to friends, family and co-workers. They liberally use such words as "brilliant, analytical and ethical" to describe Jacobs. They said they've never heard him yell.

Jacobs acknowledges that there are probably people who do not like him. But he said it's likely to be more the result of business competition than personal feelings.

With his trademark wire-rim glasses and tasseled loafers, Jacobs still has the demure look of a professor. Like his former students, many of Qualcomm's employees address him as "Dr. Jacobs."

He also never lost his Boston accent. His sons tease him mercilessly about the way he says "idears" instead of "ideas," "dater" instead of "data."

Even though Jacobs has a Ferrari (his sons gave it to him for his 70th birthday; he'd never buy one for himself), he usually drives a 3-year-old Lexus to work.

Every morning, he battles with everyone from vice presidents to receptionists to find a parking spot in the overcrowded lot. He doesn't believe in assigned spots.

He also has a pet peeve about swearing. It's in poor taste, he said.

Even when the roof of his rented camper caught on an overhead trellis in a driveway during a family trip to Italy years ago, Jacobs bit his tongue.

"He was flustered and everybody was yelling at us, but he didn't swear," said son Paul.

(Jacobs' youngest son, Jeff, may be the only person who has heard Jacobs curse. Jeff said that when he was a teenager, he overheard his father use a four-letter word while repairing a sprinkler system.)

Pity the Qualcomm employee who once used an expletive in an e-mail that got forwarded to Jacobs. The CEO took the worker to task for his inappropriate language.

In what little spare time he has, Jacobs has "loosened up," as Paul said, to enjoy some of the finer things in life.

He and his wife of 50 years live in the same La Jolla home they had custom built in 1968. It sits on a 1-acre, ocean-view lot they purchased for $37,000. Friends warned them the land was overpriced.

The Jacobs liked it so much that they bought it anyway. Two years later, after paying down the mortgage on the lot, they finally could afford to build. The sprawling 4,000-square-foot, one-story house cost them $63,000. It had dark, rough-cut plywood on the walls to save money.

"Irwin counted out the pennies to the last drop," Joan said.

To the Jacobses, it is home. They have remodeled it several times, most recently three years ago when they bought the house next door, tore it down and added a music room big enough to hold chamber-orchestra concerts.

It is Irwin Jacobs' favorite room.

Jacobs likes to retire to the acoustically sound room to listen to classical music (a little too loud, Joan said). On a recent afternoon, he had Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 blaring.

The rest of the house is filled with modern art that the Jacobses have purchased on combination business/leisure trips all over the world. Their most prized piece was purchased from a museum in Chicago: a colorful portrait that Pablo Picasso did of his wife, Francois Gilot, when she was pregnant with their daughter Paloma.

It hangs in the living room next to a black-and-white self-portrait by Gilot.

The Jacobses also delight in finding artists before they get "discovered." They purchased a Manolo Valdes painting years ago, and now it's probably worth three times the purchase price, Joan said, without revealing what they paid.

One of the Jacobses' largest personal expenditures was their personal jet, a 19-passenger Bombardier Global Express, which sells for about $45 million. Jacobs said it wasn't right to use the company jet when he took friends and family on business trips with him.

"I don't want to have second or third homes," he said. "But given the traveling that I do, this was convenient."

A hefty sum of the Jacobses' personal wealth is spent on causes they believe will make the world a better place: $120 million to the San Diego Symphony, $110 million to UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.

They've helped buy computers for foster children at San Pasqual Academy, a new library in La Jolla, a theater complex for the La Jolla Playhouse and a 1708 Stradivarius violin for the San Diego Symphony.

Even the Jacobses haven't added up all of their contributions. Business Week  magazine estimates they've donated $450 million, making them the 22nd most generous philanthropists in the United States as of last year.

The Jacobses hope to set an example for others, just as Irwin's grandparents did when he was a child. His grandparents would save their extra coins in a little blue box, then donate the money to local charities.

On Friday, Jacobs will step down as Qualcomm's CEO so that another Jacobs – his third-oldest son, Paul, 42 – can take the helm. (The elder Jacobs emphasizes that it's not nepotism; Qualcomm's other board members appointed his son.)

Irwin Jacobs will remain as chairman of the board, continuing what he does best: preaching the gospel of Qualcomm's technology worldwide.

Kathryn Balint: (619) 293-2848;

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