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

Finding Nemo
. 
“Yesterday we saw for the second time the new Pixar movie, 
Finding Nemo
, that comes out next 

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May,” he wrote. “This will be a reality check for those guys. It’s okay, but nowhere near as good 
as their previous films. Of course they think it is great.” There were two major problems with this 
email: It leaked to the 
Los Angeles Times
, provoking Jobs to go ballistic, and Eisner’s assessment 
of the movie was wrong, very wrong.
Finding Nemo
became Pixar’s (and Disney’s) biggest hit thus far. It easily beat out 
The Lion 
King
to become, for the time being, the most successful animated movie in history. It grossed 
$340 million domestically and $868 million worldwide. Until 2010 it was also the most popular 
DVD of all time, with forty million copies sold, and spawned some of the most popular rides at 
Disney theme parks. In addition, it was a richly textured, subtle, and deeply beautiful artistic 
achievement that won the Oscar for best animated feature. “I liked the film because it was about 
taking risks and learning to let those you love take risks,” Jobs said. Its success added $183 
million to Pixar’s cash reserves, giving it a hefty war chest of $521 million for the final showdown 
with Disney.
Shortly after 
Finding Nemo
was finished, Jobs made Eisner an offer that was so one-sided it 
was clearly meant to be rejected. Instead of a fifty-fifty split on revenues, as in the existing deal, 
Jobs proposed a new arrangement in which Pixar would own outright the films it made and the 
characters in them, and it would merely pay Disney a 7.5% fee to distribute the movies. Plus, the 
last two films under the existing deal—
The Incredibles
and 
Cars
were the ones in the works—
would shift to the new distribution deal.
Eisner, however, held one powerful trump card. Even if Pixar didn’t renew, Disney had the 
right to make sequels of 
Toy Story
and the other movies that Pixar had made, and it owned all the 
characters, from Woody to Nemo, just as it owned Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Eisner was 
already planning—or threatening—to have Disney’s own animation studio do a 
Toy Story 3
, 
which Pixar had declined to do. “When you see what that company did putting out 
Cinderella II
, 
you shudder at what would have happened,” Jobs said.
Eisner was able to force Roy Disney off the board in November 2003, but that didn’t end the 
turmoil. Disney released a scathing open letter. “The company has lost its focus, its creative 
energy, and its heritage,” he wrote. His litany of Eisner’s alleged failings included not building a 
constructive relationship with Pixar. By this point Jobs had decided that he no longer wanted to 
work with Eisner. So in January 2004 he publicly announced that he was cutting off negotiations 
with Disney.
Jobs was usually disciplined in not making public the strong opinions that he shared with 
friends around his Palo Alto kitchen table. But this time he did not hold back. In a conference call 
with reporters, he said that while Pixar was producing hits, Disney animation was making 
“embarrassing duds.” He scoffed at Eisner’s notion that Disney made any creative contribution to 
the Pixar films: “The truth is there has been little creative collaboration with Disney for years. 
You can compare the creative quality of our films with the creative quality of Disney’s last three 
films and judge each company’s creative ability yourselves.” In addition to building a better 
creative team, Jobs had pulled off the remarkable feat of building a brand that was now as big a 
draw for moviegoers as Disney’s. “We think the Pixar brand is now the most powerful and trusted 
brand in animation.” When Jobs called to give him a heads-up, Roy Disney replied, “When the 
wicked witch is dead, we’ll be together again.”
John Lasseter was aghast at the prospect of breaking up with Disney. “I was worried about my 
children, what they would do with the characters we’d created,” he recalled. “It was like a dagger 
to my heart.” When he told his top staff in the Pixar conference room, he started crying, and he did 
so again when he addressed the eight hundred or so Pixar employees gathered in the studio’s 
atrium. “It’s like you have these dear children and you have to give them up to be adopted by 
convicted child molesters.” Jobs came to the atrium stage next and tried to calm things down. He 
explained why it might be necessary to break with Disney, and he assured them that Pixar as an 
institution had to keep looking forward to be successful. “He has the absolute ability to make you 
believe,” said Oren Jacob, a longtime technologist at the studio. “Suddenly, we all had the 
confidence that, whatever happened, Pixar would flourish.”
Bob Iger, Disney’s chief operating officer, had to step in and do damage control. He was as 
sensible and solid as those around him were volatile. His background was in television; he had 
been president of the ABC Network, which was acquired in 1996 by Disney. His reputation was as 

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a corporate suit, and he excelled at deft management, but he also had a sharp eye for talent, a good
-humored ability to understand people, and a quiet flair that he was secure enough to keep muted. 
Unlike Eisner and Jobs, he had a disciplined calm, which helped him deal with large egos. “Steve 
did some grandstanding by announcing that he was ending talks with us,” Iger later recalled. “We 
went into crisis mode, and I developed some talking points to settle things down.”
Eisner had presided over ten great years at Disney, when Frank Wells served as his president. 
Wells freed Eisner from many management duties so he could make his suggestions, usually 
valuable and often brilliant, on ways to improve each movie project, theme park ride, television 
pilot, and countless other products. But after Wells was killed in a helicopter crash in 1994, Eisner 
never found the right manager. Katzenberg had demanded Wells’s job, which is why Eisner 
ousted him. Michael Ovitz became president in 1995; it was not a pretty sight, and he was gone in 
less than two years. Jobs later offered his assessment:
For his first ten years as CEO, Eisner did a really good job. For the last ten years, he really did a bad 
job. And the change came when Frank Wells died. Eisner is a really good creative guy. He gives really 
good notes. So when Frank was running operations, Eisner could be like a bumblebee going from 
project to project trying to make them better. But when Eisner had to run things, he was a terrible 
manager. Nobody liked working for him. They felt they had no authority. He had this strategic planning 
group that was like the Gestapo, in that you couldn’t spend any money, not even a dime, without them 
approving it. Even though I broke with him, I had to respect his achievements in the first ten years. And 
there was a part of him I actually liked. He’s a fun guy to be around at times—smart, witty. But he had a 
dark side to him. His ego got the better of him. Eisner was reasonable and fair to me at first, but 
eventually, over the course of dealing with him for a decade, I came to see a dark side to him.
Eisner’s biggest problem in 2004 was that he did not fully fathom how messed up his animation 
division was. Its two most recent movies,