His birth name is John Anthony Gills, but he was always known as Jack and he took Meg White's last name when he married her in 1996. Meg became his bandmate a year later when they formed The White Stripes. That group lasted until 2011 even though Jack and Meg divorced in 2000.
He had a brief uncredited appearance at the age of 12 in the 1987 movie The Rosary Murders, which was filmed at his home parish Holy Redeemer in southern Detroit.
Jack White almost became a priest. After being accepted into a seminary in Wisconsin, White realized he probably wouldn't have been able to bring along his new amplifier with him. He decided to go to public school instead, where he took on a three-year upholstery apprenticeship.
White produced the 2001 debut album for fellow Detroit band The Von Bondies, who were signed to the same label as The White Stripes. The groups toured together but Jack had beef with Von Bondies frontman Jason Stollsteimer, and on December 13, 2003, they got in a dispute that ended with Stollsteimer in the hospital and White charged with misdemeanor aggravated assault. White was forced to pay $750 plus court fees and ordered to take anger management classes. Stollsteimer claimed he was sucker punched and that he had to cancel a lot of press that was scheduled the next day to promote the upcoming release of the second Von Bondies album, which killed their momentum.
White has six brothers and three sisters. He is the youngest of them by seven years, with a father born in the 1920s.
He stood out in Detroit for not hanging out after shows. He's never done drugs and isn't much of a drinker, so that didn't appeal to him. "I had little to no interest in anything but the music and the friendships, the family of it," he said in the book Detroit Rock City. "It was just a little bit boring to me."
In 2007,
The White Stripes made history by playing the shortest concert ever (one note) in St. John's, Newfoundland. The next night, the band played a full set in the same city to a packed house at the Mile One Centre.
He married a British supermodel, Karen Elson, in a canoe on the Amazon river in a ceremony officiated by a shaman. The couple announced their divorce six years later in June 2011.
When White and Elson separated, they threw a party in Nashville "to celebrate their sixth anniversary and their upcoming divorce with a positive swing bang humdinger," as the invitations put it, adding: "This is only for close personal friends and family so please no plus ones or dead beats."
Jack White appeared in the documentary
It Might Get Loud with his idols Jimmy Page from
Led Zeppelin and The Edge from
U2. He wrote and recorded his first solo single "
Fly Farm Blues" in 10 minutes while the cameras were rolling.
White was a major player in the Detroit music scene from the late '90s until he moved away to Nashville in 2005. When The White Stripes got international press, he often talked up other Detroit bands, and he worked with them from time to time as well. An example is the 2002 song "
Danger! High Voltage" by the Electric Six. White sang on the track as a favor and never asked any money for it.
Jack White uses his pinky to fret notes on the guitar rather than his ring finger. This is because he injured his left ring finger in a car accident and it is not as stable as his other fingers on the same hand.
In 2012, White appeared in an episode of the hit show American Pickers. In the episode, White trades his photo booth, Jukebox, and $6,000 US for a taxidermy elephant head.
The White Stripes never had a #1 album, but Jack's solo debut, Blunderbuss, reached the top spot. His releases with his other bands, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, never reached the top spot.
He has a private three-lane bowling alley in the outbuilding of his Nashville home. He also keeps there racks of personalized bowling balls for his friends, including Bob Dylan.
Among a host of rare items that White owns are Leadbelly's New York City arrest record, a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from June 1938, which includes Superman's first published appearance and the first demo recording Elvis Presley ever made, dating from 1953. White bought the latter for $300,000 (£245,192) from an auction.
"If I'm going to invest in something, it has to have meaning to me, something that has historical value and can be passed on," he told The New Yorker. "If I buy Elvis' first record, and we are able to digitise it and release it, and people can own it, or I can preserve this comic book, it is cooler than buying some Ferrari or investing in British Petroleum."
He's part owner of Third Man Records, which opened a record store and distribution center in Nashville and a vinyl pressing plant in Detroit.
White had a secret romantic relationship with singer-songwriter Olivia Jean, who'd he signed to Third Man Records in 2009. They went public on April 8, 2022 during a concert performance at Detroit's Masonic Temple when Olivia Jean joined White and his band to perform "
Hotel Yorba." Afterwards, White popped the question to her to loud cheers from the audience. Ordained minister (and Third Man Records co-founder) Ben Swank married the pair on the stage shortly afterward.
On July 10, 2025, Jack White revealed on Instagram that he'd become the "reluctant owner of a cellular telephone for the first time in my life."
Despite decades of resisting smartphones, he embraced the device as a gift from his wife, Olivia Jean, on his 50th birthday. His tongue-in-cheek announcement captured his ambivalent stance: part humor, part acceptance, and a rare acknowledgment that even the most staunch analog purist sometimes needs to adapt.
A keen baseball fan, particularly of the Detroit Tigers, Jack White has been spotted at numerous ballparks over the years, including famously attending a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in 2014, where
his serious facial expression went viral.
White checked off the final stadium on his MLB tour on August 2, 2025, when he attended the Phillies vs. Tigers game at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. With that, he completed his quest to watch a game at all 30 Major League ballparks.
