Pixar

The Pixar company was founded in 1979 as the Graphics Group. It belonged to Lucasfilm, the company founded by Star Wars director George Lucas. In 1986, shortly after he left Apple, Steve Jobs became interested in acquiring it. Jobs paid Lucas ten million dollars for the firm, and became CEO and chairman of Pixar. Initially, Pixar developed high-performance computing hardware, which it sold primarily to government organisations and the medical community. But it raised little interest. The turning point came on the day when employee John Lasseter came to show Jobs an animated short film he’d produced on one of the machines. At that moment, Steve Jobs once again became a visionary, true to his motto “Think Different”. Once again he decided to change the world, this time with animated films. He believed that people wanted to have fun. It wasn’t until 1991 that the company won its first big contract; producing three animated films for Disney for a total of 26 million dollars. Pixar still found itself in the red, and Jobs considered selling to another company, such as Microsoft. Fortunately, he kept the firm going until 1995, when Disney confirmed it would be releasing the first of the films – Toy Story – over the summer holidays. The world loved it. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The film earned $350 million worldwide. There was a revolution. All the big Hollywood studios stopped producing classic two-dimensional animation films and started using computer animation instead. Jobs kept delivering and the following Pixar films – Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo – were also huge hits. Disney loved Pixar’s success. In 2006 it decided to buy the company for an incredible 7.4 billion dollars. This transaction made Steve Jobs, who owned 50.1% of the shares in Pixar, Disney’s biggest shareholder, with 7% of the company’s shares and a place on the board.