Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PIXAR’S FRIENDS
. . . and Foes
A Bug’s Life
When Apple developed the iMac, Jobs drove with Jony Ive to show it to the folks at Pixar. He felt 
that the machine had the spunky personality that would appeal to the creators of Buzz Lightyear 
and Woody, and he loved the fact that Ive and John Lasseter shared the talent to connect art with 
technology in a playful way.
Pixar was a haven where Jobs could escape the intensity in Cupertino. At Apple, the managers 
were often excitable and exhausted, Jobs tended to be volatile, and people felt nervous about 
where they stood with him. At Pixar, the storytellers and illustrators seemed more serene and 
behaved more gently, both with each other and even with Jobs. In other words, the tone at each 
place was set at the top, by Jobs at Apple, but by Lasseter at Pixar.
Jobs reveled in the earnest playfulness of moviemaking and got passionate about the algorithms 
that enabled such magic as allowing computer-generated raindrops to refract sunbeams or blades 
of grass to wave in the wind. But he was able to restrain himself from trying to control the creative 
process. It was at Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. 
Largely it was because he loved Lasseter, a gentle artist who, like Ive, brought out the best in Jobs.
Jobs’s main role at Pixar was deal making, in which his natural intensity was an asset. Soon 
after the release of 
Toy Story
, he clashed with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had left Disney in the 
summer of 1994 and joined with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to start DreamWorks SKG. 
Jobs believed that his Pixar team had told Katzenberg, while he was still at Disney, about its 
proposed second movie, 
A Bug’s Life
, and that he had then stolen the idea of an animated insect 
movie when he decided to produce 
Antz
at DreamWorks. “When Jeffrey was still running Disney 
animation, we pitched him on 
A Bug’s Life
,” Jobs said. “In sixty years of animation history, 
nobody had thought of doing an animated movie about insects, until Lasseter. It was one of his 
brilliant creative sparks. And Jeffrey left and went to DreamWorks and all of a sudden had this 
idea for an animated movie about—Oh!—insects. And he pretended he’d never heard the pitch. 
He lied. He lied through his teeth.”
Actually, not. The real story is a bit more interesting. Katzenberg never heard the 
Bug’s Life
pitch while at Disney. But after he left for DreamWorks, he stayed in touch with Lasseter, 
occasionally pinging him with one of his typical “Hey buddy, how you doing just checking in” 
quick phone calls. So when Lasseter happened to be at the Technicolor facility on the Universal 
lot, where DreamWorks was also located, he called Katzenberg and dropped by with a couple of 
colleagues. When Katzenberg asked what they were doing next, Lasseter told him. “We described 
to him 
A Bug’s Life
, with an ant as the main character, and told him the whole story of him 
organizing the other ants and enlisting a group of circus performer insects to fight off the 
grasshoppers,” Lasseter recalled. “I should have been wary. Jeffrey kept asking questions about 
when it would be released.”
Lasseter began to get worried when, in early 1996, he heard rumors that DreamWorks might be 
making its own computer-animated movie about ants. He called Katzenberg and asked him point-
blank. Katzenberg hemmed, hawed, and asked where Lasseter had heard that. Lasseter asked 
again, and Katzenberg admitted it was true. “How could you?” yelled Lasseter, who very rarely 
raised his voice.
“We had the idea long ago,” said Katzenberg, who explained that it had been pitched to him by 
a development director at DreamWorks.
“I don’t believe you,” Lasseter replied.

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Katzenberg conceded that he had sped up