So, the iPhones and the Macs, discontinued iPods and the macintoshes, iPad and MacBooks. Apple in other words. You and I maybe won't find one kid who hasn't heard or knows about Apple computers. Especially since the iPhones. And one name is synonymous with Apple. And that is as all you know, Steve Jobs. The illustrated innovator died in 2011. And upon his death his net worth was calculated at a little over 10 billion dollars. That made him one of the leading billionaires in the world back then.
Now, the average person would think Jobs became a billionaire through Apple. Well it's partly true because Apple did make him a billion dollars. And his share in Apple was actually worth over a billion, but Apple isn't the company that actually made his first billion. And that's the fun story. Moving on.
So yes, Apple was first founded in a garage with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Roland Wayne. The very first capital came from Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his high end calculator. The trio started out well as they got into computer technologies. A couple years in, and Ronald Wayne sold his 33% of the company for 800 dollars. Which today is about half a trillion dollars.
I wonder how Ronald Wayne feels about it. But that's not the case. We all know that after the macintoshes there was a rift between the board of directors. As a result of which, Steve Jobs got fired from his own company by the employees he hired. In the feud Jobs sold all his shares of Apple. Except one. He kept only one share just so he could attend the annual board meetings. But he sold the rest because of obvious reasons. After departing from Apple Jobs had to find another project to fuel his ambition.
In comes Lucasfilm. The computer graphics team of Lucasfilm branched out with the ambition to someday make an entire film movie only using computers. This is the type of ambition Jobs loves. So he invested millions into it. Computer technology wasn't as advanced back then so Jobs had to fund it for a long time in research and development. The first big reward of this, the massively famous and successful, Toy Story. By that time the company was named Pixar. And in the making of Toy Story, Pixar worked closely with Walt Disney. And if you are into movies then you might know how much of a monopoly Disney is creating.
Seeing the huge success in Pixar back then, Disney offered to acquire the company for over 7 billion dollars. Somewhere around 2006. And by that time Jobs owned the majority of Pixar. And "One more thing", those 7 billions? They weren't paid in cash to Pixar. They were paid in stocks of Disney. So while Pixar got acquired by Disney, owners of Pixar owned 7 billion dollars worth of stocks in Disney. And since Jobs was a majority owner, well, you get the point. There is Job's first ever billion. That's when he first became a billionaire. And after that, the number only rose.
After this Jobs founded Next computers. Which eventually got acquired by Apple. Making Jobs return to Apple again. And they as they call it, is history.
