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

Luxo Jr.
got a prolonged standing ovation 
and was named the best film. “Oh, wow!” Jobs exclaimed at the end. “I really get this, I get what 
it’s all about.” As he later explained, “Our film was the only one that had art to it, not just good 
technology. Pixar was about making that combination, just as the Macintosh had been.”
Luxo Jr.
was nominated for an Academy Award, and Jobs flew down to Los Angeles to be 
there for the ceremony. It didn’t win, but Jobs became committed to making new animated shorts 
each year, even though there was not much of a business rationale for doing so. As times got 
tough at Pixar, he would sit through brutal budget-cutting meetings showing no mercy. Then 
Lasseter would ask that the money they had just saved be used for his next film, and Jobs would 
agree.
Tin Toy
Not all of Jobs’s relationships at Pixar were as good. His worst clash came with Catmull’s 
cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith. From a Baptist background in rural north Texas, Smith became a free
-spirited hippie computer imaging engineer with a big build, big laugh, and big personality—and 
occasionally an ego to match. “Alvy just glows, with a high color, friendly laugh, and a whole 
bunch of groupies at conferences,” said Pam Kerwin. “A personality like Alvy’s was likely to 
ruffle Steve. They are both visionaries and high energy and high ego. Alvy is not as willing to 
make peace and overlook things as Ed was.”
Smith saw Jobs as someone whose charisma and ego led him to abuse power. “He was like a 
televangelist,” Smith said. “He wanted to control people, but I would not be a slave to him, which 
is why we clashed. Ed was much more able to go with the flow.” Jobs would sometimes assert his 
dominance at a meeting by saying something outrageous or untrue. Smith took great joy in calling 
him on it, and he would do so with a large laugh and a smirk. This did not endear him to Jobs.
One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the 
delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At 
the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that 
out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, 
or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he 
tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was 
a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. “Before I knew it, we were in 
each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith 
pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted.
“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs 
stormed out.
Smith eventually resigned to form a new company to make software for digital drawing and 
image editing. Jobs refused him permission to use some code he had created while at Pixar, which 

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further inflamed their enmity. “Alvy eventually got what he needed,” said Catmull, “but he was 
very stressed for a year and developed a lung infection.” In the end it worked out well enough; 
Microsoft eventually bought Smith’s company, giving him the distinction of being a founder of 
one company that was sold to Jobs and another that was sold to Gates.
Ornery in the best of times, Jobs became particularly so when it 
became clear that all three Pixar endeavors—hardware, software, and animated content—were 
losing money. “I’d get these plans, and in the end I kept having to put in more money,” he 
recalled. He would rail, but then write the check. Having been ousted at Apple and flailing at 
NeXT, he couldn’t afford a third strike.
To stem the losses, he ordered a round of deep layoffs, which he executed with his typical 
empathy deficiency. As Pam Kerwin put it, he had “neither the emotional nor financial runway to 
be decent to people he was letting go.” Jobs insisted that the firings be done immediately, with no 
severance pay. Kerwin took Jobs on a walk around the parking lot and begged that the employees 
be given at least two weeks notice. “Okay,” he shot back, “but the notice is retroactive from two 
weeks ago.” Catmull was in Moscow, and Kerwin put in frantic calls to him. When he returned, he 
was able to institute a meager severance plan and calm things down just a bit.
At one point the members of the Pixar animation team were trying to convince Intel to let them 
make some of its commercials, and Jobs became impatient. During a meeting, in the midst of 
berating an Intel marketing director, he picked up the phone and called CEO Andy Grove directly. 
Grove, still playing mentor, tried to teach Jobs a lesson: He supported his Intel manager. “I stuck 
by my employee,” he recalled. “Steve doesn’t like to be treated like a supplier.”
Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed that Pixar give Intel suggestions on how to 
improve the capacity of its processors to render 3-D graphics. When the engineers at Intel 
accepted the offer, Jobs sent an email back saying Pixar would need to be paid for its advice. Intel’
s chief engineer replied, “We have not entered into any financial arrangement in exchange for 
good ideas for our microprocessors in the past and have no intention for the future.” Jobs 
forwarded the answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer’s response to be “extremely 
arrogant, given Intel’s dismal showing in understanding computer graphics.” Grove sent Jobs a 
blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is “what friendly companies and friends do for each 
other.” Grove added that he had often freely shared ideas with Jobs in the past and that Jobs 
should not be so mercenary. Jobs relented. “I have many faults, but one 
of them is not ingratitude,” he responded. “Therefore, I have changed my position 180 
degrees—we will freely help. Thanks for the clearer perspective.”
Pixar was able to create some powerful software products aimed at average consumers, or at least 
those average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for designing things. Jobs still hoped that the 
ability to make super-realistic 3-D images at home would become part of the desktop publishing 
craze. Pixar’s Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the shadings on the 3-D objects 
they created so that they could display them from various angles with appropriate shadows. Jobs 
thought it was incredibly compelling, but most consumers were content to live without it. It was a 
case where his passions misled him: The software had so many amazing features that it lacked the 
simplicity Jobs usually demanded. Pixar couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was making 
software that was less sophisticated but far less complicated and expensive.
Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product lines foundered, Jobs kept protecting the 
animation group. It had become for him a little island of magical artistry that gave him deep 
emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it and bet on it. In the spring of 1988 cash was 
running so short that he convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When 
it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing 
some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking 
skeptical. It would require close to $300,000 more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked 
if there were any storyboards. Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and once Lasseter 
started his show—displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his passion for his product—
Jobs started to warm up.
The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It was told from the perspective of a toy one-
man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him. Escaping under the 

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couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes 
back out to cheer him up.
Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed in what John was doing,” he later said. “It 
was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only comment at the end of Lasseter’s 
presentation was, “All I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”
Tin Toy
went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short films, the first computer-
generated film to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his team to Greens, a vegetarian 
restaurant in San Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the Oscar, which was in the center of the table, held 
it aloft, and toasted Jobs by saying, “All you asked is that we make a great movie.”
The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the film 
division—began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked 
Tin Toy
, and they thought that 
something more could be done with animated stories of toys that come alive and have human 
emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he 
could create a new world of computer-generated animation. He told Catmull, “I can go to Disney 
and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.” So Disney began talking about making a 
production deal with Pixar. “Lasseter’s shorts were really breathtaking both in storytelling and in 
the use of technology,” recalled Katzenberg. “I tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he was loyal 
to Steve and Pixar. So if you can’t beat them, join them. We decided to look for ways we could 
join up with Pixar and have them make a film about toys for us.”
By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into Pixar—more than 
half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he was still losing money at 
NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their options as part 
of his agreement to add another round of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic in 
his love for what artistry and technology could do together. His belief that ordinary consumers 
would love to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out to be wrong, but that was soon 
replaced by an instinct that turned out to be right: that combining great art and digital technology 
would transform animated films more than anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had given 
life to Snow White.
Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on animation sooner 
and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or software applications. On the other 
hand, had he known the hardware and software would never be profitable, he would not have 
taken over Pixar. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”

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