How much does steve jobs earn a year
I arrived at Pixar in February Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, greeted me and, over the first couple of days, walked me around the company, introducing me to the key players and describing my role.
For as much as people were friendly and polite, I also felt they were a bit distant and aloof. It started with Pam Kerwin, a Pixar Vice-President who was general manager of various business operations within Pixar.
She was a little older than me, in her early-forties, with striking red hair and a sweet demeanor that quickly made others feel at ease around her. Her office was just down the hallway from mine, and she was one of the few people who invited me to say hello and give me the lay of the land. My mission was to transform Pixar into a thriving enterprise.
I was supposed to be an agent of change. And people are angry about that. Perhaps part of your job is to fix that, but every day that passes without a solution, people grow more cynical. Many here have been waiting for years to own a little piece of Pixar. In my first days at Pixar I encountered animosity directed toward Steve throughout the company, especially from those who had been there since the early days.
I began to fear that my concerns about Steve were coming true. I had accepted the job at Pixar with a considerable amount of skepticism. Although Steve and I were getting along great so far, his mercurial reputation had made most people I knew caution me against working with him.
Even more problematic was the company itself.
I was going to be more alone than I expected. After the initial shock wore off a bit, my instinct was to figure out how to try and use this to my advantage.
That gave me a chance to quietly explore planet Pixar. But they had little choice other than to wait and see what happened because they had invested so much time in the company.
I was the most recent of those, having received a promise of stock options when I joined the company. Besides the top executives, everyone else was excluded. This was a disaster in the making.
There were constant gripes as I made my rounds at Pixar: That might work for a company just starting out, one that might expect to hire 50 or so employees in its first couple of years. But Pixar already had close to employees and many of those were seasoned veterans who, by Silicon Valley standards, were entitled to significant stock option amounts. My job was not to take sides but to broker a solution that would work for Steve and the rest of the company.
It was the first timea I felt myself pitted against Steve. He began to get irritated whenever I brought up the subject. I worried about how seriously we would be taken as an entertainment company. I picked up the phone one night and called him. He was on the verge of dismissing it. I suggested a number. It was as far as I thought he might go.
It would barely get us by now. I at last had my first real toe hold. The option plan was pivotal to moving Pixar forward. But now the stakes were higher than ever. Those stock options needed to be worth a lot one day. Pixar was aiming for the big time. What seems to emerge from nowhere belies a long process of development, trials, and missteps.
If anything proved that case, it was Pixar. The gestation of Toy Story could be traced back 16 years to when Pixar had been the computer graphics division at Lucas Film. It had been a long and arduous path since then, with no end of challenges. It reminded me of the meter sprint in the Olympic games. A lifetime of training to become the fastest runner in the world came down to a single ten-second performance.
If the world fell in love with Toy Story, Pixar would have a chance to usher in a new era of animated entertainment. It was a magic number in the film business, and very difficult to achieve, even more so in animation. In all of film history, only four animated feature films had a domestic box office greater than a hundred million, and all of those had been made by Disney: Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas.
How Steve Jobs Became a Billionaire
In animation, for all practical purposes, Disney had been the only game in town for over fifty years. We should be worth more. But Steve needed to be on board. If we double it, Pixar will be valued at a billion dollars. All the bankers are on board.
We had our starting place. We had arranged a chain of phone calls through which we would know how well Toy Story had performed Friday night. I rushed to answer it.
How much interest do you earn on one million dollars?
You have my fax number. Disney thinks the film will have a huge run. It had never really occurred to any of us that we might reach into that territory. We totally did it. Central to that story is Lawrence Levy, the man who Jobs reached out to, unknown, in November of and hired as CFO.
To take the scrappy company public. Everyone was friendly, welcoming, and greeted me with polite gestures like: That much was true. This was a lot to take in.
It was an unwelcome surprise, to say the least. These were the risks I had known. On this issue I was caught squarely in the middle. Steve wanted to reduce his share as little as possible. He was also adamant about taking no risk that he would lose control of the company in the future. He wanted to avoid any risk of being in a position like he had been in at Apple aapl where the Board had effectively ousted him from the company against his will.
The more I waded into this issue, the more I felt like a punching bag for everyone: And so, on my long commute between the Berkeley Hills and the San Francisco Bay, I worried. I worried about Disney dis claiming the space that Pixar was creating. But it was the stock options that bothered me the most.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Steve once told me that the gestation of great products takes much longer than it appears. The first number, the opening weekend box office for Toy Story, would tell us how well Toy Story would perform overall.
This meant that, after all those years of evolving the technology and then four more years of actually making Toy Story, Pixar would learn on a single Friday night in November what the world thought of its work. A domestic box office run—meaning the total North American ticket sales for Toy Story—of a hundred million would be sweet indeed.
Eventually our investment bankers came up with their own verdict. On the morning of Saturday, November 26, all I could do was pace. It was now approaching For more on Apple executives, watch this Fortune video: All products and services featured are based solely on editorial selection. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes. Thank you for your interest in licensing Fortune content.
Steve Jobs: Net Worth | Investopedia
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