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

The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast,
and 
Aladdin
, there were then 
ten years of nothing.”
Iger went back to Burbank and had some financial analysis done. He discovered that they had 
actually lost money on animation in the past decade and had produced little that helped ancillary 
products. At his first meeting as the new CEO, he presented the analysis to the board, whose 
members expressed some anger that they had never been told this. “As animation goes, so goes 
our company,” he told the board. “A hit animated film is a big wave, and the ripples go down to 
every part of our business—from characters in a parade, to music, to parks, to video games, TV, 
Internet, consumer products. If I don’t have wave makers, the company is not going to succeed.” 
He presented them with some choices. They could stick with the current animation management, 
which he didn’t think would work. They could get rid of management and find someone else, but 
he said he didn’t know who that would be. Or they could buy Pixar. “The problem is, I don’t know 
if it’s for sale, and if it is, it’s going to be a huge amount of money,” he said. The board authorized 
him to explore a deal.
Iger went about it in an unusual way. When he first talked to Jobs, he admitted the revelation 
that had occurred to him in Hong Kong and how it convinced him that Disney badly needed Pixar. 
“That’s why I just loved Bob Iger,” recalled Jobs. “He just blurted it out. Now that’s the dumbest 
thing you can do as you enter a negotiation, at least according to the traditional rule book. He just 
put his cards out on the table and said, ‘We’re screwed.’ I immediately liked the guy, because that’
s how I worked too. Let’s just immediately put all the cards on the table and see where they fall.” 
(In fact that was not usually Jobs’s mode of operation. He often began negotiations by proclaiming 
that the other company’s products or services sucked.)
Jobs and Iger took a lot of walks—around the Apple campus, in Palo Alto, at the Allen and Co. 
retreat in Sun Valley. At first they came up with a plan for a new distribution deal: Pixar would 
get back all the rights to the movies and characters it had already produced in return for Disney’s 
getting an equity stake in Pixar, and it would pay Disney a simple fee to distribute its future 
movies. But Iger worried that such a deal would simply set Pixar up as a competitor to Disney, 
which would be bad even if Disney had an equity stake in it. So he began to hint that maybe they 
should actually do something bigger. “I want you to know that I am really thinking out of the box 
on this,” he said. Jobs seemed to encourage the advances. “It wasn’t too long before it was clear to 
both of us that this discussion might lead to an acquisition discussion,” Jobs recalled.
But first Jobs needed the blessing of John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, so he asked them to come 
over to his house. He got right to the point. “We need to get to know Bob Iger,” he told them. “We 
may want to throw in with him and to help him remake Disney. He’s a great guy.” They were 
skeptical at first. “He could tell we were pretty shocked,” Lasseter recalled.

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“If you guys don’t want to do it, that’s fine, but I want you to get to know Iger before you 
decide,” Jobs continued. “I was feeling the same as you, but I’ve really grown to like the guy.” He 
explained how easy it had been to make the deal to put ABC shows on the iPod, and added, “It’s 
night and day different from Eisner’s Disney. He’s straightforward, and there’s no drama with 
him.” Lasseter remembers that he and Catmull just sat there with their mouths slightly open.
Iger went to work. He flew from Los Angeles to Lasseter’s house for dinner, and stayed up well 
past midnight talking. He also took Catmull out to dinner, and then he visited Pixar Studios, alone, 
with no entourage and without Jobs. “I went out and met all the directors one on one, and they 
each pitched me their movie,” he said. Lasseter was proud of how much his team impressed Iger, 
which of course made him warm up to Iger. “I never had more pride in Pixar than that day,” he 
said. “All the teams and pitches were amazing, and Bob was blown away.”
Indeed after seeing what was coming up over the next few years—
Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-
E
—Iger told his chief financial officer at Disney, “Oh my God, they’ve got great stuff. We’ve got 
to get this deal done. It’s the future of the company.” He admitted that he had no faith in the 
movies that Disney animation had in the works.
The deal they proposed was that Disney would purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Jobs 
would thus become Disney’s largest shareholder, with approximately 7% of the company’s stock 
compared to 1.7% owned by Eisner and 1% by Roy Disney. Disney Animation would be put 
under Pixar, with Lasseter and Catmull running the combined unit. Pixar would retain its 
independent identity, its studio and headquarters would remain in Emeryville, and it would even 
keep its own email addresses.
Iger asked Jobs to bring Lasseter and Catmull to a secret meeting of the Disney board in 
Century City, Los Angeles, on a Sunday morning. The goal was to make them feel comfortable 
with what would be a radical and expensive deal. As they prepared to take the elevator from the 
parking garage, Lasseter said to Jobs, “If I start getting too excited or go on too long, just touch 
my leg.” Jobs ended up having to do it once, but otherwise Lasseter made the perfect sales pitch. 
“I talked about how we make films, what our philosophies are, the honesty we have with each 
other, and how we nurture the creative talent,” he recalled. The board asked a lot of questions, and 
Jobs let Lasseter answer most. But Jobs did talk about how exciting it was to connect art with 
technology. “That’s what our culture is all about, just like at Apple,” he said.
Before the Disney board got a chance to approve the merger, however, Michael Eisner arose 
from the departed to try to derail it. He called Iger and said it was far too expensive. “You can fix 
animation yourself,” Eisner told him. “How?” asked Iger. “I know you can,” said Eisner. Iger got 
a bit annoyed. “Michael, how come you say I can fix it, when you couldn’t fix it yourself?” he 
asked.
Eisner said he wanted to come to a board meeting, even though he was no longer a member or 
an officer, and speak against the acquisition. Iger resisted, but Eisner called Warren Buffett, a big 
shareholder, and George Mitchell, who was the lead director. The former senator convinced Iger 
to let Eisner have his say. “I told the board that they didn’t need to buy Pixar because they already 
owned 85% of the movies Pixar had already made,” Eisner recounted. He was referring to the fact 
that for the movies already made, Disney was getting that percentage of the gross, plus it had the 
rights to make all the sequels and exploit the characters. “I made a presentation that said, here’s 
the 15% of Pixar that Disney does not already own. So that’s what you’re getting. The rest is a bet 
on future Pixar films.” Eisner admitted that Pixar had been enjoying a good run, but he said it 
could not continue. “I showed the history of producers and directors who had X number of hits in 
a row and then failed. It happened to Spielberg, Walt Disney, all of them.” To make the deal worth 
it, he calculated, each new Pixar movie would have to gross $1.3 billion. “It drove Steve crazy that 
I knew that,” Eisner later said.
After he left the room, Iger refuted his argument point by point. “Let me tell you what was 
wrong with that presentation,” he began. When the board had finished hearing them both, it 
approved the deal Iger proposed.
Iger flew up to Emeryville to meet Jobs and jointly announce the deal to the Pixar workers. But 
before they did, Jobs sat down alone with Lasseter and Catmull. “If either of you have doubts,” he 
said, “I will just tell them no thanks and blow off this deal.” He wasn’t totally sincere. It would 

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have been almost impossible to do so at that point. But it was a welcome gesture. “I’m good,” said 
Lasseter. “Let’s do it.” Catmull agreed. They all hugged, and Jobs wept.
Everyone then gathered in the atrium. “Disney is buying Pixar,” Jobs announced. There were a 
few tears, but as he explained the deal, the staffers began to realize that in some ways it was a 
reverse acquisition. Catmull would be the head of Disney animation, Lasseter its chief creative 
officer. By the end they were cheering. Iger had been standing on the side, and Jobs invited him to 
center stage. As he talked about the special culture of Pixar and how badly Disney needed to 
nurture it and learn from it, the crowd broke into applause.
“My goal has always been not only to make great products, but to build great companies,” Jobs 
later said. “Walt Disney did that. And the way we did the merger, we kept Pixar as a great 
company and helped Disney remain one as well.”

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