Steve loved the answer.

ON AUGUST 9, Steve got lucky again, when a little company called Netscape Communications went public. Netscape’s product, the first popular Internet browser, was a revolutionary thing, but there was no obvious way for the company to turn it into a big moneymaker. No matter—the public’s enthusiasm for technology and this new darling called the Internet was about to soar. Netscape shares were offered at $28, and closed the day at $58.25, giving the new company a valuation of $2.9 billion.

After Netscape’s IPO, Pixar didn’t seem quite so wispy a bet. Robertson, Stephens, a San Francisco investment bank, agreed to underwrite the IPO and filed a prospectus with the SEC in October. Steve decided to push his luck even further, and set the date for Pixar’s IPO on November 29, 1995, merely one week after Toy Story’s debut. If the movie had flopped, the IPO would have been a disaster, and all Steve’s efforts to get Pixar onto more secure financial footing would have been for naught.

But of course that’s not what happened. The movie is a masterpiece, a soulful, funny film of such enduring power that the American Film Institute includes it in its list of the one hundred greatest American movies. And Pixar’s IPO the following week was a blockbuster as well, raising $132 million and giving the company a market capitalization of $1.4 billion. Lasseter, Catmull, Steve, and other Pixarians gathered to follow the affair from Robertson, Stephens’s offices in downtown San Francisco. Shortly after the opening bell, when the stock was trading above the $22-per-share price that the bank had established, Catmull saw Steve pick up the phone in an office to the side. “Hello, Larry?” Steve said into the handset, once his pal Ellison was on the line. “I made it.” Steve, who owned 80 percent of the company, was a billionaire.

WHILE STEVE DID enjoy comparing notes and playing games with Ellison, who at the time was one of the very richest men in the world (and still is), money wasn’t what thrilled Steve about Pixar. What thrilled him was to once again play a part in the creation of a successful and profoundly beautiful product that employed brilliant new technology that had seemingly unlimited potential. He loved that once again he was an architect of what the world could not help but recognize as a remarkably creative enterprise. Steve hadn’t felt that way for what had seemed like eons. Not since the introduction of the Macintosh eleven years earlier.

The incredible success of Toy Story, and of Pixar in general, had a huge personal significance for Steve as well. He always wanted to make products that he both loved and found useful. That’s part of the reason that things never seemed quite so magical at NeXT; unlike Bill Gates, Steve couldn’t throw himself completely into the creation of a product that suited a particular market but that didn’t thrill him personally. The NeXT computer and the subsequent software products were admirable, and elegantly beautiful in their own ways, but they were aimed at institutions rather than people. With Toy Story, for the first time in his life, he had a hand in the creation of a product that a young family like his own could enjoy as well. Laurene was pregnant with daughter Erin, the second of their three children. Steve reveled in the fact that Toy Story was something that his kids could enjoy, and even their kids as well.

In retrospect, the fact that Toy Story was the beginning of Steve’s professional resurrection seems preposterously appropriate. Its plot established the Pixar formula: a likable character is the cause of his own downfall, often as a result of hubris; but he (or she, once Pixar finally made Brave) overcomes weakness through kindness, bravery, quick wits, invention, or some combination thereof, and thereby earns a redemption that makes him—or her—an even better and more complete toy (or bug, car, fish, princess, monster, robot, mouse, or superhero!). The hero’s downfall, incidentally, often involves some kind of exile, as in Toy Story, where Woody “accidentally” sends Buzz careening into Sid’s backyard, and then must join him to engineer a hair-raising escape from that evil child. The parallels to Steve’s own exile from Apple are obvious.

Toy Story also gave Steve back his confidence. He and I spoke several times in the months after the IPO, and I could tell he was beyond ecstatic about the way things had gone. He talked about what had happened at Pixar—and about his role in its success—with real pride. He was generous in giving large stock grants to Catmull and Lasseter, and he personally handed out bonus paychecks of an extra month’s pay to all Pixar employees in December. Sure, some of them grumbled that they hadn’t received higher stock grants. And sure, Steve claimed more credit for Pixar’s sudden success than he deserved. But even Alvy Ray Smith, the original partner of Catmull who had left after clashing with Steve, later admitted that Pixar could not have succeeded without him. “We should have failed,” Alvy told one interviewer. “But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer another defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”

As happy as Steve was, however, to bask in the glory of Pixar’s success, he quickly moved on. He had another motive for engaging me in all those post-IPO conversations. He was starting to think about his old company down in Cupertino.

Chapter 8

Bozos, Bastards, and Keepers

Thanks to the unlikely, dizzying success of Toy Story and the Pixar IPO, Steve was back in the limelight. He got more than his fair share of the attention, but neither Ed Catmull nor John Lasseter cared too much about that. Now that Pixar was on solid financial footing, they were both ecstatic to be developing their next movie, A Bug’s Life, without having to worry about the fate of their company. To the outside world, it seemed that Jobs had rediscovered his pixie dust. The success of Toy Story had given the myth of Steve Jobs a rather nice touch-up.

The question now was whether Steve’s Pixar triumph was a one-shot anomaly. For a man whose name eventually would become synonymous with great American second acts, the Steve Jobs of 1996 had had remarkably little success with his own sequels. The Apple II had been followed by the Apple III and the Lisa, both of which had been failures. The Mac became a success only in the more robust versions introduced by John Sculley. His most grandiose sequel of all, NeXT, the company he’d created to be an idealized version of Apple, had proved utterly anticlimactic.

Pixar had provided some redemption. But Steve, of course, had been on top of the world before. The question was whether he’d handle it any better than he had in the past. Would he repeat the same mistakes? Or—to put it in the language of Pixar—would he make like Woody in Toy Story and take to heart what he learned in exile? Could he temper his ego, play well with others, defeat his enemies, and emerge a true hero?

THE LAST FOUR years of NeXT, following the demise of the IBM deal in 1992, were something of a tragicomedy. Steve tried so many different strategies that the company meandered without direction. He created a cheaper, pizza-box-shaped computer called the NeXTstation, but it never gained any traction. He and his team decided to design another model, based on a new microprocessor called the PowerPC chip—the same one that Apple’s newer Macs would be using. But eventually they decided there was no real market for the machine—not a single one was ever manufactured.