Steve Jobs. This is a name forever tied to Apple. From founding the company, getting fired from it, and then returning and making the tech giant one of the biggest companies in the world,?Steve Jobs had an eventful journey with Apple.?
Apple will always be the first company that comes to everyone¡¯s mind when we talk about Steve Jobs. But, did you know that he did not become a billionaire because of Apple?
Yes, you read that right. Apple wasn't the company that made Steve Jobs a billion for the first time. Then which company was it? Well, it was another company named Pixar that made him earn his first billion dollars.
In 1994, Steve Jobs met with his Pixar colleague Lawrence Levy to break the news of thinking about going back to Apple.
"Steve wasn't sure Apple could be saved. And the last thing he wanted was to return to Apple and then be held responsible if he failed to rescue the faltering company," Levy wrote in his book ¡°To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History¡±, as per a?CNN report.?
Before Jobs became Apple CEO again, he was the CEO and owner of Pixar. It was in 1986 that Steve Jobs acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, Ltd. and renamed it Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1% until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006.
In the mid-'90s, when Pixar was still working on its first feature film (Toy Story) and struggling financially, Steve Jobs recruited Lawrence Levy to be Pixar's CFO and turn the business around, as per the report.
Levy's book shows how he worked closely with Jobs to focus Pixar's business, build an iconic brand and ultimately guide it toward a successful IPO and later an acquisition by Disney.
Soon after taking the CFO role, it became clear to Levy that Jobs was bent on the idea of taking Pixar public and showing the world that at least one of his post-Apple bets was a success.
"If there was one event that would unquestionably signify Steve's redemption, it would be Pixar's IPO," Levy wrote in the book, as per the report. "Whenever we talked about it, his tone took on a weight and importance of almost biblical proportion."
Finally, Pixar went public on November 29, 1995. That morning, Jobs and Levy "huddled around a computer" in San Francisco watching the stock. And as the price soared, an investment banker in the room reportedly turned to Jobs and said, "Congratulations Steve, you're a billionaire." Jobs later stepped out of the room and called his friend and Oracle founder Larry Ellison to say, "Larry, I made it."
"Having reached the ranks of billionaire and having the success of the IPO behind him buoyed Steve enormously," Levy said.
This may have helped Jobs "take that risk" of returning to Apple, according to Levy. But once Jobs was back in the Apple CEO spot, he benefited from his time at Pixar in other ways.?And it was through Pixar that Steve Jobs got his first true taste of the entertainment industry.
"We literally learned the entertainment industry together there," Levy had reportedly said. "We literally shuttled back and forth to Hollywood to learn it."
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The knowledge and relationships he cultivated in that industry would prove useful as he pushed to turn Apple around with products in the entertainment space like the iPod, iTunes Store and Apple TV, as per the report.
As per Forbes,?at the time of his death, most of Steve Jobs' wealth still came from Disney, due to Disney's purchase of Pixar in 2006; as the largest individual shareholder, he owned about $4.47 billion of Disney stock.
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