The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [110]
But his ambitions were truly grand. He explained that Disney was his model, and that the “heart” of the entire Disney entertainment conglomerate was feature animation. Disney sold half the videos in the world, he said, and animation was the driver. Animation was vital to the success of Disney’s theme parks, its Broadway musicals, its consumer products. It was the engine of the empire. And it was incredibly lucrative. An animated movie that did $200 million at the box office would bring in total revenues of $800 million with all the extras, and half of that sum, $400 million, was profit. Disney’s feature animation operation was worth $10 billion, Steve said, maybe even more. That’s what he wanted. He was going to create another money machine of that awesome scale and scope, another Disney. He told his shareholders: “We’re trying to build a second one of these.”
He left the explicit implications of his scenario largely unspoken. It was a between-the-lines message, but it was very clear: Disney was worth $10 billion. Pixar’s market value had hovered for a long time around $2 billion. When Pixar became the next Disney, it too would be worth $10 billion. The shares were going to quintuple as Steve fulfilled his plan. That might mean Pixar theme parks, Pixar retail stores, Pixar live onstage. The movies were just the start, the foundation for a much larger empire, coming soon.
For some of Steve’s fans, it wasn’t soon enough. Gossip had spread on the Internet that Pixar and Apple were going to merge with Disney, and that Steve would take over as Michael Eisner’s successor. At the Pixar shareholders meeting, someone asked Steve about this speculation, but Steve shrugged it off.
“There’s no truth to the rumor that we’re about to make a hostile takeover of Disney,” he said with bemusement.
That much was true. Steve wasn’t going to run the old Disney. He wanted Pixar to be the new Disney.
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HIS PIXAR SHARES remained the sole source of Steve’s wealth. By turning down the board’s repeated offers of large blocks of Apple stock, Steve Jobs had forfeited a paper profit of upward of $1 billion. He still worked at Apple for $1 a year, saying that he only took that dollar so his family would qualify for the company’s health plan. His old friends said that Steve was intent on making a statement, showing that he was saving Apple because of love, not money.
Steve had gone without a salary many times in the past. He hadn’t taken one at Next for the first five years, until he married Laurene and bought the Palo Alto house and she insisted that they have more cash. His pay at Pixar had ranged from zero to $50 a year. He always made his money as an owner, not an employee. At Pixar and Next he had tried to keep as much stock as possible for himself. At Apple, he still didn’t have more than a single share. He was one of the few megalomaniacal moguls who ever considered himself rich enough.
One billion was sufficient for him—or was it? In January 2000, when he finally accepted the title of Apple CEO, he also accepted two gifts from the board of directors: a Gulfstream V private jet, worth at least $40 million, and options on ten million shares of Apple stock, which were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Why, after spending so much time making a symbolic gesture, did he ruin it all with such a reversal?
In other ways, too, he began to take on the trappings of corporate power and privilege. He fell back on an old bad habit from his first run at Apple, leaving his Mercedes in the handicap spots in the parking lot, which led one employee to put a sign on the car: PARK DIFFERENT. He moved from his conspicuously small office at Apple to a larger and more impressive executive office, which he had made fun of when it was built by Gil Amelio. He asked for approval from