Steve Jobs Didn’t Become a Billionaire Thanks to Apple. He Got Rich From a Company He Bought From George Lucas

Steve Jobs’ archetypal billion-dollar payoff didn’t travel from Cupertino. It started connected 2/3/1986, erstwhile helium bought Lucasfilm’s machine graphics part from George Lucas for $5 million, enactment successful different $5 cardinal to money it, and renamed the cognition Pixar portion taking astir a 70% stake. After Toy Story deed theaters connected 11/22/1995, Pixar’s 11/29/1995 IPO priced astatine $22 a stock and pushed Jobs into billionaire territory, years earlier his 1997 instrumentality helped remake Apple. Fortune’s 6/22/2026 look astatine Toy Story 5’s $312 cardinal opening play is simply a reminder that Jobs’ biggest aboriginal stake yet ended with Disney buying Pixar successful 2006 for $7.4 billion.

A shrewd $10 cardinal stake connected machine graphics

It is easy, years later, to compress Steve Jobs into a azygous company. But 1 of the astir revealing chapters of his vocation happened distant from Cupertino, wrong a tiny computer-graphics store that astir radical did not yet cognize however to value. A Fortune portion published June 22, 2026 usefully ties that arc to hard numbers.

On February 3, 1986, Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s machine graphics division, The Graphics Group, from George Lucas. He paid $5 cardinal for the exertion and enactment successful different $5 cardinal arsenic startup capital, totaling $10 million, past renamed the institution Pixar. In that Lucasfilm deal, Jobs took astir 70% of the caller standalone company, with the remaining shares going to Pixar employees.

The agelong runway to the 1995 IPO

The stake did not wage disconnected quickly. Jobs yet invested astir $50 cardinal of his ain wealth to support Pixar afloat arsenic it mislaid wealth for astir a decade. The turning constituent arrived with Toy Story, released successful theaters connected November 22, 1995 arsenic the world’s archetypal afloat computer-animated diagnostic film.

One week later, Pixar went nationalist connected November 29, 1995, successful what was described arsenic the biggest IPO of that year. The banal was priced astatine $22, and with Jobs owning upwards of 80% by that point, helium crossed into billionaire presumption for the archetypal time, per this November 29, 1995 IPO account. The chronology matters: Jobs did not instrumentality to Apple until 1997, meaning Pixar, not Apple, produced his archetypal fortune.

How Disney turned equity into a lasting stake

In 2006, the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion successful an all-stock woody nether then-CEO Bob Iger. By then, Jobs held astir 49.65% of Pixar, and the transaction converted his involvement into astir 138 cardinal Disney shares worthy astir $4.6 cardinal astatine the time, making him Disney’s largest idiosyncratic shareholder with astir a 7% stake.

Disney has kept monetizing the franchise astatine a standard that looks much similar level economics than box-office trivia: since the archetypal 1995 release, Toy Story has driven $16 cardinal successful gross to Disney, including user products, games, and publishing. Fortune noted Toy Story 5’s $312 million opening play successful June 2026, a modern datapoint that traces consecutive backmost to Jobs’ 1986 determination to bargain a graphics part and wait.