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When Bob Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, he had a risky idea: to buy Pixar.
At the time, Walt Disney Animation Studios had “hesitated,” Iger said in an interview with Bloomberg “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” published Wednesday. Pixar and Disney had a joint venture to co-produce Pixar films, including blockbusters like “Toy Story”, “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo”.
But Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple and Pixar, said publicly in 2004 that the relationship between Pixar and Disney was ending because the companies could not agree on a distribution deal.
Iger saw that Disney Animation “needed a huge improvement,” he said in the Bloomberg interview. “I thought the fastest way to do this, although the riskiest and the most expensive, was to buy Pixar.”
Before joining the Disney board of directors, Iger had to convince Jobs.
“When the idea of buying Pixar came to me, I called it,” Iger said. “I was actually quite nervous.”
Iger thought it would be best to have this conversation with Jobs in person. “I said, ‘I have a crazy idea, and am I coming to talk to you about it?'”
“Anyone who knows Steve would know if you say ‘I’ve got a crazy idea’ to Steve he should hear it right away,” Iger said. Indeed, Jobs asked Iger to tell him what his idea was over the phone.
Jobs’ response to the proposal? “Well, it’s not that crazy,” Iger recalls.
The couple met at Apple headquarters weeks after the phone call to discuss the plan. This included the list of pros and cons on a whiteboard.
“Steve said he liked the whiteboard exercises, where an entire vision – all the thoughts, all the drawings and all the calculations – could be drawn, at the whim of whoever was holding the pen,” Iger wrote in his autobiography “The Ride of a Lifetime.”
For example, according to Iger, Jobs’ list of downsides included: “Disney culture will destroy Pixar!”; “DISTRACTION WILL KILL PIXAR’S CREATIVITY” and “Your board will never let you go”.
At the end of the whiteboard session, Jobs told Iger, “A few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The exercise at Apple headquarters had a profound effect on Iger.
“What I saw that day left me breathless – the level of talent and creative ambition, the commitment to quality, the ingenuity of the storytelling, the technology, the structure of the story. direction and the air of an enthusiastic collaboration – even the building, the architecture itself, “Iger wrote in his autobiography. “It was a culture that anyone in a creative endeavor, in any business, would aspire to.”
Jobs’ vision was the key to convincing the board, Iger wrote. “It’s hard to imagine a better salesperson for something so ambitious.”
Eventually, Disney bought Pixar for $ 7.4 billion in 2006. Jobs became a member of Disney’s board of directors and the company’s largest shareholder.
When Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, his wife Laurene Powell Jobs inherited the 138 million Disney shares he owned. In 2017, the trust controlled by Powell Jobs reduced its holdings to 4%.
Iger resigned his role as CEO of Disney in February.
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