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

Toy Story
I saw before it came out,” said Larry Ellison. “It eventually 
became a form of torture. I’d go over there and see the latest 10% improvement. Steve is obsessed 
with getting it right—both the story and the technology—and isn’t satisfied with anything less 
than perfection.”
Jobs’s sense that his investments in Pixar might actually pay off was reinforced when Disney 
invited him to attend a gala press preview of scenes from 
Pocahontas
in January 1995 in a tent in 
Manhattan’s Central Park. At the event, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that 
Pocahontas
would have its premiere in front of 100,000 people on eighty-foot-high screens on the Great Lawn 
of Central Park. Jobs was a master showman who knew how to stage great premieres, but even he 
was astounded by this plan. Buzz Lightyear’s great exhortation—“To infinity and beyond!”—
suddenly seemed worth heeding.
Jobs decided that the release of 
Toy Story
that November would be the occasion to take Pixar 
public. Even the usually eager investment bankers were dubious and said it couldn’t happen. Pixar 
had spent five years hemorrhaging money. But Jobs was determined. “I was nervous and argued 
that we should wait until after our second movie,” Lasseter recalled. “Steve overruled me and said 
we needed the cash so we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney 
deal.”
To Infinity!
There were two premieres of 
Toy Story
in November 1995. Disney organized one at El Capitan, a 
grand old theater in Los Angeles, and built a fun house next door featuring the characters. Pixar 
was given a handful of passes, but the evening and its celebrity guest list was very much a Disney 
production; Jobs did not even attend. Instead, the next night he rented the Regency, a similar 
theater in San Francisco, and held his own premiere. Instead of Tom Hanks and Steve Martin, the 

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guests were Silicon Valley celebrities, such as Larry Ellison and Andy Grove. This was clearly 
Jobs’s show; he, not Lasseter, took the stage to introduce the movie.
The dueling premieres highlighted a festering issue: Was 
Toy Story
a Disney or a Pixar movie? 
Was Pixar merely an animation contractor helping Disney make movies? Or was Disney merely a 
distributor and marketer helping Pixar roll out its movies? The answer was somewhere in 
between. The question would be whether the egos involved, mainly those of Michael Eisner and 
Steve Jobs, could get to such a partnership.
The stakes were raised when 
Toy Story
opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. 
It recouped its cost the first weekend, with a domestic opening of $30 million, and it went on to 
become the top-grossing film of the year, beating 
Batman Forever
and 
Apollo 13
, with $192 
million in receipts domestically and a total of $362 million worldwide. According to the review 
aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of the seventy-three critics surveyed gave it a positive review. 
Time
’s Richard Corliss called it “the year’s most inventive comedy,” David Ansen of 
Newsweek
pronounced it a “marvel,” and Janet Maslin of the 
New York Times
recommended it both for 
children and adults as “a work of incredible cleverness in the best two-tiered Disney tradition.”
The only rub for Jobs was that reviewers such as Maslin wrote of the “Disney tradition,” not the 
emergence of Pixar. After reading her review, he decided he had to go on the offensive to raise 
Pixar’s profile. When he and Lasseter went on the 
Charlie Rose
show, Jobs emphasized that 
Toy 
Story
was a Pixar movie, and he even tried to highlight the historic nature of a new studio being 
born. “Since 
Snow White
was released, every major studio has tried to break into the animation 
business, and until now Disney was the only studio that had ever made a feature animated film 
that was a blockbuster,” he told Rose. “Pixar has now become the second studio to do that.”
Jobs made a point of casting Disney as merely the distributor of a Pixar film. “He kept saying, 
‘We at Pixar are the real thing and you 
Disney guys are shit,’” recalled Michael Eisner. “But we were the ones who made 
Toy Story
work. We helped shape the movie, and we pulled together all of our divisions, from our consumer 
marketers to the Disney Channel, to make it a hit.” Jobs came to the conclusion that the 
fundamental issue—Whose movie was it?—would have to be settled contractually rather than by a 
war of words. “After 
Toy Story
’s success,” he said, “I realized that we needed to cut a new deal 
with Disney if we were ever to build a studio and not just be a work-for-hire place.” But in order 
to sit down with Disney on an equal basis, Pixar had to bring money to the table. That required a 
successful IPO.
The public offering occurred exactly one week after 
Toy Story
’s opening. Jobs had gambled that 
the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a 
celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the 
shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about 
$14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the 
company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his wildest hopes. It 
exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, 
and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. It then went up even 
further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39.
Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely 
recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of 
the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 
billion
. That was 
about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of 
the 
New York Times
that the money did not mean much to him. “There’s no yacht in my future,” 
he said. “I’ve never done this for the money.”
The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to 
finance its movies. That was just the leverage Jobs wanted. “Because we could now fund half the 
cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits,” he recalled. “But more important, I wanted 
co-branding. These were to be Pixar as well as Disney movies.”
Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They had a three-
picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Each side had its own nuclear weapons. After an 
acrimonious split with Eisner, Katzenberg had left Disney and become a cofounder, with Steven 

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Spielberg and David Geffen, of DreamWorks SKG. If Eisner didn’t agree to a new deal with 
Pixar, Jobs said, then Pixar would go to another studio, such as Katzenberg’s, once the three-
picture deal was done. In Eisner’s hand was the threat that Disney could, if that happened, make 
its own sequels to 
Toy Story
, using Woody and Buzz and all of the characters that Lasseter had 
created. “That would have been like molesting our children,” Jobs later recalled. “John started 
crying when he considered that possibility.”
So they hammered out a new arrangement. Eisner agreed to let Pixar put up half the money for 
future films and in return take half of the profits. “He didn’t think we could have many hits, so he 
thought he was saving himself some money,” said Jobs. “Ultimately that was great for us, because 
Pixar would have ten blockbusters in a row.” They also agreed on co-branding, though that took a 
lot of haggling to define. “I took the position that it’s a Disney movie, but eventually I relented,” 
Eisner recalled. “We start negotiating how big the letters in ‘Disney’ are going to be, how big is 
‘Pixar’ going to be, just like four-year-olds.” But by the beginning of 1997 they had a deal, for 
five films over the course of ten years, and even parted as friends, at least for the time being. 
“Eisner was reasonable and fair to me then,” Jobs later said. “But eventually, over the course of a 
decade, I came to the conclusion that he was a dark man.”
In a letter to Pixar shareholders, Jobs explained that winning the right to have equal branding 
with Disney on all the movies, as well as advertising and toys, was the most important aspect of 
the deal. “We want Pixar to grow into a brand that embodies the same level of trust as the Disney 
brand,” he wrote. “But in order for Pixar to earn this trust, consumers must know that Pixar is 
creating the films.” Jobs was known during his career for creating great products. But just as 
significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And he created two of 
the best of his era: Apple and Pixar.

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