Steve Jobs’s BaZi: Bing Fire Led by Eating God, and an Hour Decided by 9 Minutes

Steve Jobs’s birth time is on his birth certificate: 7:15 p.m. on 24 February 1955, in San Francisco. By clock time that is the Xu hour, and it is the chart most often found online. Converted to true solar time (the time by the Sun’s actual position, which BaZi uses) it is 18:51, in the You hour, only 9 minutes short of the Xu hour. Like Barack Obama, he sits on the You/Xu boundary, and again the two hours give charts with opposite favorable elements. The difference is that this time, when we check the charts backwards against his luck pillars, the result sides with our own method.

Birth data

San Francisco lies about 2.4 degrees west of the Pacific time zone’s standard meridian (120° W), so the Sun runs about 10 minutes behind the clock; and late February is one of the times of year when the equation of time is at its largest, pulling it back roughly another 14 minutes. 7:15 on the clock becomes 18:51 in true solar time.

The two charts side by side

Both charts read balanced, but one leans strong and the other leans weak, on opposite sides of the midline, so the favorable elements swap completely. With a chart that scores near the middle like this, moving the hour pillar is the easiest way to flip the verdict.

Checking backwards through the luck pillars: this time true solar time wins

For a man born in a yin year (the year stem Yi is yin), the luck pillars run backwards, starting at age 7. The two charts have exactly the same luck pillars.

“fav / unfav” reads the stem first, then the branch: whether each one’s element is favorable (useful), unfavorable, or neither (neutral) for this chart. Each column uses that version’s own favorable and unfavorable elements.

The clearest evidence is the Gui-You luck pillar, 2001–2010. This was the most brilliant decade of his life and of Apple’s, with the iPod, iPhone and iPad transforming whole industries one after another. In the You-hour version this pillar is favorable in both stem and branch; in the Xu-hour version it is unfavorable in both.

Individual years line up too:

In 1985 the stem Yi Wood is unfavorable in the You-hour version but favorable in the Xu-hour version. A year in which he was pushed out of the company he himself had started looks more like an unfavorable element taking the lead.

So this time checking the chart against events supports the You hour, that is, our site’s true-solar-time method. Taken together, we have now worked through three hour-boundary cases: Obama’s luck pillars support clock time, Buffett’s cannot be settled, and Jobs’s support true solar time. Three cases, three different results. That is exactly the point: when a birth time falls near a boundary, no method is guaranteed to be right. Look at both charts, then test them against your own life.

The You-hour chart: full of Eating God, with a Bing Fire Sun

The Bing Fire Day Master is the Sun among the ten heavenly stems. It was born in the Yin month, just after Li Chun (the Start of Spring, where the BaZi year turns); Wood feeds Fire, so it is in season. What stands out most in the chart is Output (Earth): Wu Earth, Eating God, shows on the month stem, and Earth is also hidden in the day branch Chen, the year branch Wei and the month branch Yin. Eating God stands for taste, focus, the ability to take one thing to its limit, and also for “what you produce”.

The engine also points to a particular structure: Resource (Wood) and Output (Earth) are evenly matched and pulling against each other. Resource stands for absorbing, learning, faith and protection; Output stands for expression and creation. Wood controls Earth, so when Resource is strong it smothers what Eating God produces, which the tradition calls “the owl steals the food”. This tug-of-war can be read in several ways. We list them, but none is a conclusion:

• A pull between the spiritual and the product. As a young man he traveled in India and practiced Zen for many years (the Resource side), yet he was also the most demanding person alive about product detail (the Eating God side). His minimalist design aesthetic can be seen as the place where the two meet.
• Indirect Resource hidden in the month branch. The main hidden stem of the Yin month branch is Jia Wood, Indirect Resource. In traditional imagery Indirect Resource can stand for an adoptive mother or an elder who is not a birth parent, and Jobs was adopted soon after he was born. Teachers of the art often use this as an example, but traditional imagery always has many meanings, and the great majority of people with the same structure were never adopted.

In the You-hour version the hour pillar is Ding-You: the You Metal branch (Direct Wealth) combines with the day branch Chen into Metal, so Wealth merges with the seat he sits on. For a chart that favors Metal and Water, a Wealth star that is favorable and combines into the day branch is one reason the Gui-You luck pillar (another You) ran so smoothly.

Where does the chart miss his real life?

Steve Jobs died in October 2011, shortly after entering the Ren-Shen luck pillar. We do not use BaZi to discuss lifespan or illness, and that holds for every chart in this series.

Zi Wei Dou Shu chart

The same birth time, cast in Zi Wei Dou Shu (San He school, the same engine as our Zi Wei chart tool, using the same true solar time as the BaZi chart above). BaZi weighs the five elements and what the chart favors; Zi Wei looks at which stars fall in which palace. The two systems ask different questions, so the Zi Wei chart is shown on its own first, followed by where it agrees and disagrees with the BaZi reading.

The gold frame is the Life Palace; the shaded palaces are its three-sides-and-four-directions (Wealth, Career, Travel). Solid badges are the birth-year transformations (Lu, Quan, Ke, Ji), red names are the six malefic stars, and the small word after a major star is its brightness.

On our main chart (true solar time, You hour) the Life Palace holds Lian Zhen and Tian Xiang together (in the Wu palace), with Huo Xing; the Wealth Palace holds Zi Wei and Tian Fu, with Zi Wei carrying Ke, and the Career Palace holds Wu Qu. Life, Wealth and Career are exactly the Zi Wei, Lian Zhen and Wu Qu triangle. Lian Zhen with Tian Xiang is a principled pairing that cares about quality and doing things properly; Lian Zhen itself runs at high emotional intensity, and Huo Xing adds impatience and explosive force. On clock time (Xu hour) the Life Palace becomes Lian Zhen and Tan Lang, both stars fallen: more desire, more charisma, more emotional intensity. The two versions share one thing: Lian Zhen is in the Life Palace either way. On the BaZi side, checking backwards through the luck pillars supports the true-solar-time You hour. On the Zi Wei side, both versions have something that fits (the perfectionism of Lian Zhen with Tian Xiang, the personal magnetism of Lian Zhen with Tan Lang), so the Zi Wei chart itself cannot help decide the hour. All we can say is that both hours point to Lian Zhen’s intensity.

With the other birth-time versions, the Zi Wei chart becomes:

In BaZi the hour pillar changes every two hours while the day pillar and above stay put. In Zi Wei the Life Palace is set by the lunar month and the hour, so a different hour moves the Life Palace, the Body Palace, the bureau and every major star at once. The same dispute over a birth hour therefore usually matters more for Zi Wei than for BaZi.

For school, leap-month and Zi-hour settings see the Zi Wei chart page; for how the two systems differ see BaZi vs Zi Wei Dou Shu. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any star can be made to explain it.

Western astrology chart

The same moment of birth, cast as a Western natal chart (tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, the same engine as our natal chart tool). A natal chart uses the sky at the moment of birth, so it needs no true-solar-time correction, but it does need the latitude of the birthplace to fix the Ascendant and the houses. BaZi and Zi Wei are both derived from the Chinese calendar, while a natal chart computes planetary positions directly. Because the three systems start from different places, the chart is listed on its own below, followed by where it agrees with the BaZi and Zi Wei readings.

Sun in Pisces, Moon in Aries, Virgo rising. A Virgo Ascendant gives a first impression of perfectionism and an eye for detail; he insisted that even the circuit boards nobody would ever see inside a product had to look good, which is almost the textbook description of Virgo rising. The chart ruler, Mercury, is in Aquarius (innovation, standing apart from the crowd), in the 5th house (creativity), and it is retrograde. Tradition says people with Mercury retrograde think differently from everyone else, and “Think Different” happens to be the line from his advertising. What the Pisces Sun brings is intuition and a sense of beauty, not engineering ability. One more point is worth making: the BaZi discussion above turns on the You-versus-Xu hour dispute, but a natal chart uses the sky at the moment of birth and needs no true-solar-time conversion, so the clock-time and true-solar-time versions give one and the same natal chart.

Domicile, exaltation, fall and detriment in brackets are the classical categories for how comfortably a planet works in a sign; they are not verdicts of good or bad. For how to read the big three, the ten planets and aspects, see rising sign, Moon sign, the ten planets and aspects. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any sign can be made to explain it.

How close is your birth time to a boundary?

Both charts on this page come from the same engine as the chart on our home page. Enter your birthplace there and the site will show you the full true-solar-time conversion. If, like Jobs, you are less than 20 minutes from an hour boundary, we suggest casting both hours and checking them against the luck pillars you have already lived through.