Steve Jobs

worldwide. According to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of the seventy-three critics surveyed gave it a positive review.
Time
’s Richard Corliss called it “the year’s most inventive comedy,” David Ansen of
Newsweek
pronounced it a “marvel,” and Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
recommended it both for children and adults as “a work of incredible cleverness in the best two-tiered Disney tradition.”
    The only rub for Jobs was that reviewers such as Maslin wrote of the “Disney tradition,” not the emergence of Pixar. After reading her review, he decided he had to go on the offensive to raise Pixar’s profile. When he and Lasseter went on the
Charlie Rose
show, Jobs emphasized that
Toy Story
was a Pixar movie, and he even tried to highlight the historic nature of a new studio being born. “Since
Snow White
was released, every major studio has tried to break into the animation business, and until now Disney was the only studio that had ever made a feature animated film that was a blockbuster,” he told Rose. “Pixar has now become the second studio to do that.”
    Jobs made a point of casting Disney as merely the distributor of a Pixar film. “He kept saying, ‘We at Pixar are the real thing and youDisney guys are shit,’” recalled Michael Eisner. “But we were the ones who made
Toy Story
work. We helped shape the movie, and we pulled together all of our divisions, from our consumer marketers to the Disney Channel, to make it a hit.” Jobs came to the conclusion that the fundamental issue—Whose movie was it?—would have to be settled contractually rather than by a war of words. “After
Toy Story
’s success,” he said, “I realized that we needed to cut a new deal with Disney if we were ever to build a studio and not just be a work-for-hire place.” But in order to sit down with Disney on an equal basis, Pixar had to bring money to the table. That required a successful IPO.
    The public offering occurred exactly one week after
Toy Story
’s opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing them at $22, which would give the company more money if the offering was a success. It was, beyond even his wildest hopes. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. In the first half hour, the stock shot up to $45, and trading had to be delayed because there were too many buy orders. It then went up even further, to $49, before settling back to close the day at $39.
    Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2
billion
. That was about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the
New York Times
that the money did not mean much to him. “There’s no yacht in my future,” he said. “I’ve never done this for the money.”
    The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies. That was just the leverage Jobs wanted. “Because we could now fund half the cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits,” he recalled. “But more important, I wanted co-branding. These were to be Pixar as well as Disney movies.”
    Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They had a three-picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Each side had its own nuclear weapons. After an acrimonious split with Eisner, Katzenberg had left Disney and become a cofounder, with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, of DreamWorks SKG. If Eisner didn’t agree to a new deal with Pixar, Jobs said, then Pixar would go to another studio, such as Katzenberg’s, once the three-picture deal was done. In Eisner’s hand was the threat that Disney could, if that happened, make its own sequels to
Toy Story
, using Woody and Buzz and all of the characters that Lasseter had created. “That would have been like molesting our children,” Jobs later recalled. “John started crying when he considered that possibility.”
    So they hammered out a new