The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [85]
Larry Ellison was accompanied by an ornamental anonymous blonde but he seemed to be interested only in his best friend, Steve Jobs. He stood besides Steve and helped receive the guests, as if the two of them were the bride and groom at a wedding banquet. Steve was elegant in a tuxedo with a beige silk waistcoat, his idea of a “creative” twist.
The pundit Stewart Alsop was known as a court-jester type even when he was sober, and he helped himself to Disney’s free booze and quickly got a little drunk, which eliminated his inhibitions almost entirely. He went up to Steve and Larry and said:
“Have you heard my asshole theory?”
“No,” Larry replied.
“If you look at the really big companies that are still run by their founders, they’re all assholes.”
Larry thought over the idea for a moment.
“Did you just call me an asshole?” he asked, more astonished than outraged.
“Not in a bad sense,” Stewart said, delighted that he could taunt the billionaire.
• • •
TOY STORY RECEIVED EXULTANT PRAISE from the film critics, and it earned an impressive $29 million in U.S. box-office receipts during its first weekend.
Early on the morning of November 29, Ed Catmull and Pam Kerwin met in downtown San Francisco at Pixar’s investment bank, Robertson Stephens & Company. They rode up the elevator to a high floor and found the trading room, where well-groomed twentysomethings huddled in front of consoles stacked with computer screens and telephone lines. The financiers had set up a table with glasses of fresh Odwalla carrot juice, which they knew was Steve’s favorite beverage. (Steve liked Odwalla’s organic juices and fruit shakes so much that he kept a refrigerator full of them at the office and he had become a friend and an informal business adviser to the company’s president. When a child died from drinking Odwalla’s completely natural, unpasteurized apple juice, the executive had called Steve out of a meeting and asked him how to handle the crisis.)
The trading in Pixar’s stock was scheduled to start at 7 A.M. California time, a half hour after the markets opened in New York. Just moments before seven, Steve Jobs came running through the hallways, making his entrance as dramatic as possible.
The original plan had been to start the trading at a relatively low $12 to $14 a share. Lawrence Levy, the chief financial officer, argued for this cautious approach, but Steve wanted to take a bigger risk and try for a huge hit. At his insistence, Robertson Stephens set the opening price at $22. Now the market would decide who was right.
The clock struck seven and the phone consoles began lighting up. Seemingly everyone wanted Pixar stock. The price shot from $22 to $49 in the first half hour.
The threesome looked at each other as they silently multiplied the share price by their number of shares. “We were just completely freaked out,” recalls Pam Kerwin.
Steve Jobs was worth nearly $1.5 billion.
• • •
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1996, Steve had already made two of what would be his three most valuable contributions to Pixar. First, he had bankrolled the venture through nearly a decade of struggle and uncertainty until it became a financial success. “Pixar failed nine times over by normal standards,” recalls Alvy Ray Smith, “but Steve didn’t want to fail so he kept writing the checks. He would have sold us to anybody in a moment, and he tried really hard, but he wanted to cover his loss of fifty million dollars.” Hallmark had looked at buying Pixar. In 1994 Steve tried to sell the company to Microsoft, which had just bought Alvy’s startup and hired Alvy as a research fellow. But no one would cover Steve’s loss and make him whole. He had held on