will destroy Pixar!” I couldn’t blame him
for that. His experience with Disney so
far hadn’t provided any evidence to the
contrary. He went on, writing his cons
in full sentences across the board. “Fix-
ing Disney Animation will take too long
and will burn John and Ed out in the pro-
cess.” “There’s too much ill will and the
healing will take years.” “Wall Street will
hate it.” “Your board will never let you
do it.” There were many more, but one
in all cap letters, “DISTRACTION WILL
KILL PIXAR’S CREATIVITY.” I assumed
he meant that the whole process of a deal
and the assimilation would be too much
of a shock to the system they’d created.
It seemed pointless for me to add to his
list, so we moved to the pros. I went rst
and said, “Disney will be saved by Pixar
and we’ll all live happily ever after.” Steve
smiled but didn’t write it down. “What
do you mean?” I said, “Turning Anima-
tion around will totally change the per-
ception of Disney and shift our fortunes.
Plus, John and Ed will have a much larger
canvas to paint on.”
Two hours later, the pros were meager
and the cons were abundant, even if a
few of them, in my estimation, were quite
petty. I felt dispirited, but I should have
expected this. “Well,” I said. “It was a nice
idea. But I don’t see how we do this.” “A
few solid pros are more powerful than doz-
ens of cons,” Steve said. “So what should
we do next?” We agreed I needed to learn
more about Pixar and to see it rsthand.
If I had to name the 10 best days I’ve
ever had on the job, that rst visit would be
high on the list. What I saw that day left me
breathless—the level of talent and creative
ambition, the commitment to quality, the
storytelling ingenuity, the technology, the
leadership structure, and the air of enthu-
siastic collaboration—even the building,
the architecture itself. It was a culture
that anyone in a creative business, in any
business, would aspire to. And it was so
far beyond where Disney Animation was
and beyond anything we might be able to
achieve on our own that I felt we had to do
all we could to make this happen.
When I got back to my oce in Bur-
bank, I met immediately with my team.
It’s an understatement to say they didn’t
share my enthusiasm. There were too
many risks, they said. The cost wouldbe too great. Many people thought Steve
would be impossible to deal with and
would try to run the company. They
worried that I was barely into my tenure
as CEO and I was already putting my
future—not to mention the company’s
future—on the line by pursuing this.
But my instinct about Pixar was pow-
erful. I believed this acquisition could
transform us. It could x Disney Anima-
tion; it could add Steve Jobs, arguably the
strongest possible voice on issues of tech-
nology, to the Disney board; it could bring
a culture of excellence and ambition into
ours that would reverberate in much-
needed ways throughout the company.
Not long after, I ew to San Jose and
met with Steve at Apple’s headquarters.
I knew going in that I didn’t want the
process to be drawn out. Steve was con-
stitutionally incapable of a long, com-
plicated back-and-forth, and I feared
that if we got bogged down on any one
point, he would sour on the whole thing
and walk away. So as soon as we sat
down, I said, “I’ll be straight with you.
This is something I feel we have to do.”
Steve agreed, but unlike in the past,BLOOD
BROTHERS
Jobs and Iger
announce
their rst of many
deals, 2005.MAN OF
CHARACTERS
Iger at Toy Story 3’s
world premiere
in Hollywood, 2010.FUN AND
FRAMES
Director John
Lasseter and Jobs at
Pixar, 1997.134 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019
PHOTOGRAPHS: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP, BY PAUL SAKUMA/A.P. IMAGES, © LEE ROTH/CAPITAL PICTURES, BY DIANA WALKER/SJ/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES