
How Steve Jobs Became a Billionaire - prostoalex
http://fortune.com/steve-jobs-pixar-apple-lawrence-levy/
======
M_Grey
He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they
didn't particularly faze him. Most people who do that fail horribly, but if
you work backwards from a list of highly successful people, you may find that
pattern of behavior occasionally bears fruit. The same is true of playing the
lottery, but it would be wrong to assume that the secret to success is to play
it.

Truly, for a bunch of very smart people, you'd think the tech community would
be more aware of the dangers of working backwards from a pool of successful
people, hoping to find a magic ingredient. Work from the broad population
forward, not from the narrow population, back.

~~~
ryandrake
Almost every business book and online article about how $BUSINESS or
$ENTREPRENEUR became successful does this. It's infuriating. "Let's wait to
see which of the 7 billion people on the planet become billionaires, and then
look back and see what they did, ignoring all those who did similar things and
did not become billionaires." Totally flawed, yet the public eats it up like
candy.

Go read Good To Great and prepare to barf. Business schools adore this book.
Look at the description on Jim Collins's web site [1]: "Start with 1,435 good
companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that
became great. Now here's how you can do it too." That's literally Survivorship
Bias.

1: [http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-
gr...](http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html)

~~~
M_Grey
Everyone wants to be successful, and no one wants to believe that it's not
something they could control if they just knew the "secret". Add that to the
fact that no one ever sold a self-help book entitled, "Getting Lucky", and it
starts to make sense how we've arrived at this point.

Great link by the way.

~~~
ryandrake
We've all done that exercise in school where the professor tells everyone
ahead of time to bring a coin to class. Then he has everyone stand up and flip
a coin. Everyone who flips tails sits down. Those remaining standing flip it
again, those flipping tails sit down, repeat until there is one person
standing.

Then interview that last person and ask her what her technique was, how could
she possibly flip heads 6 times in a row? What hard work and practice did she
do ahead of time to make her such a good coin flipper? What daily habits
produced this proficiency? This is essentially what we do when we try to be
successful simply by asking successful people what they did.

~~~
stellar678
Of course the person who chose to not flip their coin at all...didn't end up
being the person to flip the most heads in a row.

So the truth lies somewhere between "it's entirely chance" and "it's entirely
hard work/intelligence/participation".

~~~
Bulkington
Or, in my case in that school exercise: "I cheated." And so did the other
finalist. But he was a known scoundrel, and I was the 'nice kid.' The last
coin flip was the only one that was monitored. I won, and it was hailed and a
just result. So, it's not all luck.

------
Animats
Jobs didn't do Pixar. Ed Catmull did Pixar. Jobs was the investor.

The real payoff for Jobs with Pixar was that it made the iPod possible. Others
had done MP3 players, but nobody had a good deal with the music industry. Jobs
was able to do that for a Hollywood reason - as a studio owner, he outranked
the music execs, and they had to take his calls. Hollywood is very
hierarchical like that.[1] At the time, Apple was a nobody in the music
industry, had no consumer electronics products, and was not doing all that
well in desktop computers. It was heading Pixar that got him in the door at
Warner, Sony, and Universal.

[1] [http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/itunes-10th-
anniversa...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/itunes-10th-anniversary-
how-steve-jobs-turned-the-industry-upside-down-20130426)

~~~
williamle8300
He was more than an investor. He believed in the computer graphics work that
they were doing and became the sole owner of Pixar when they were on the brink
of disbanding. He bought the company outright and moved them from the
eastcoast to the westcoast. That's huge. Nobody does that as an investor. You
have to really believe in that on a core, personal level to do that.

~~~
sedachv
> Nobody does that as an investor.

Private equity investors that specialize in turnarounds and restructurings do
that on a daily basis.

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kutkloon7
While I think Steve Jobs was a huge dick and doesn't deserve all the praise he
gets, I do think that his one quality was to be harsh about things in an
honest way.

When an engineer spent a week overworking to be able to boot a system, he is
the one guy that will say it is not enough and needs to go faster. That he had
no respect for others, and considered his will the only important things
probably helped quite a bit in enforcing his vision.

~~~
prostoalex
Couldn't this be said about most founders of most failed startups?

In revisionist history, if the founder was persistent and the product achieved
a product-market fit, it was a vision. If the founder was persistent, and the
product did not achieve product-market fit, it was a delusion and toxic work
environment.

~~~
rudolf0
I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Some engineers are willing
to work in a harsh, toxic environment if they think the founder _isn 't_
delusional and is actually onto something. I presume that's how Apple
employees felt.

People are willing to put up with authoritarian assholes if they think their
vision is worth implementing.

------
pastProlog
Far down in this article, Apple co-founder Rod Holt explains what he thought
it was about Steve Jobs that put him into the vanguard.

[http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-
jobs](http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs)

Particularly the part where he talks about commodities and products, and the
process and relations of production at early Apple.

I think what much of what Holt says will go over the heads of people not in
the milieu of Holt, Proyect etc. Not all of it will though.

One reason I find the Holt piece interesting is everyone else seems to come at
the question from the same angle. Holt does not, but more importantly Jobs did
not. Also Holt was there when Apple was incorporated, and had a very
thoughtful sociological Weltanschauung back then.

You can tell everyone comes at it from the same angle by the OP title. How
Steve Jobs became a billionaire. People who start from that point, a desire to
get insanely rich and spend money and be admired, will probably never get to
be be billionaire. I don't think that they'll get it either.

Most people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc. don't seem to be focused on
wealth. Even someone like Larry Ellison who seems to be focused on wealth gets
more stirred up talking about engineering one of the first usable relational
databases than he does about his billions.

The US is in such a homogeneous ideological fog that it is easy to miss the
forest for the trees. Holt was around when Apple started, but was not a
participant in what C. Wright Mills called the great American celebration, so
I find his viewpoint interesting, and in my opinion, more insightful than any
other I've heard.

------
nibs
Luck = more successful than me

Lazy = less successful than me

Not useful words, regardless of if it is true or not. There is no formula
despite our brain desparately seeking one. My experiences with surfing the
internet, sugar and other things suggest that seeking != the right metric for
utility to you now or in the future.

------
lifeisstillgood
Ed Catmull talks about the Pixar IPO in the book (below)

Before Toy Story came out, when Ed was not even sure they would even get a
film out the door, Jobs started planning the IPO. Catmull disagreed, but Jobs
pushed it through, and Pixar IPO'd a month or two after the barn-stomrning
success of Pixar. The IPO made Jobs a billionaire, and put pIxar on the
finanical footing to its current success.

Jobs knew how to, and took risks that even a fantastic business-builder like
Catmull was afraid too.

Its a skill, and a personality that is rare and it built the foundation for
two world class businesses on the same IPO. Don't knock him ... too much.

~~~
taneq
I think with n=1 it's pretty hard to call it a skill. He made a call and was
lucky. And it wasn't a hard call for him to make - if Toy Story had flopped,
at least he wouldn't be out of pocket for the ongoing expenses of the studio.
He took a punt on win-big-or-quit when he was planning on quitting anyway. The
only downside to the call was for the people working for him, and his track
record on that front speaks for itself.

~~~
tajen
Every time someone succeeds, people call it out for good luck.

In the case of Steve Jobs, that takes a lot of good luck. Good luck repeated
reliably over the course of his life.

It's funny how good luck falls more on people often who work hard...

~~~
ryandrake
Attributing a causal relationship between hard work and success ignores the
millions who work hard and are not successful.

~~~
charlesdm
Hard work in itself doesn't matter. You also have to work in a smart way. Most
people work hard, but not smart.

~~~
dvtv75
The wealthy boss will always sell you on hard work being responsible for being
where he is today. But who gains most from a hard working employee - the
employee or the boss?

~~~
charlesdm
The boss, obviously. Most wealthy people I know with net worths over $100m
(maybe some tech founders excluding) aren't really hard working.. they're
strategic thinkers and deal makers, and they know how to get stuff done, but I
would not consider them hard working. They tend to live relatively relaxed
lifestyles but are smart about how to achieve results when required. And when
required, that might mean once a year.

------
signa11
there is a book called "creativity inc." by ed-catmull which also is pretty
good. it is more of an exposition of management style at pixar than anything
else though. might not suit everyone's fancy :)

edit: but if you like that kind of thing, then it's the kind of thing that you
would like.

~~~
rmason
Jason Calacanis interviewed Ed Catmull on this week in startups:

Part 1: [http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-
pt1/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-pt1/)

Part 2: [http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-
pt2/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/ed-catmull-pixar-disney-pt2/)

~~~
signa11
> Jason Calacanis interviewed Ed Catmull on this week in startups

this is very cool ! thank you :)

------
natch
The author built up huge empathy for the employees in the article, but then
decided not to let us know how they came out. Too bad. Still, great article.

~~~
giarc
>Excerpted from “To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey With Steve Jobs to
Make Entertainment History,”

He likely covers it in the book.

------
joaomacp
These comments are so focused on the negative side of Jobs, I have to think
there's at least a bit of envy there... A bit of the thought "oh, he was more
successful than me, so he must have been worse in other ways"

~~~
rralian
I might be envious of his success, but I don't think that's the source of the
negativity. There's quite a bit of documentation of him behaving in ways that
I don't think are acceptable (your opinion may vary). Here's an article from a
quick google search. [http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-
jerk-2011-10](http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10)

~~~
takahisah
It looks like this article came out a week after his death. Sometimes it
amazes me how tasteless and low these writers can be.

------
omegaworks
No follow up on the employee share issue? Did they feel compensated fairly?
Kind of a sloppy article.

~~~
paublyrne
Yes I read to the end to find the answer to that. I guess you have to buy the
book.

------
jonathanstrange
Luck. Mostly.

------
skynetv2
He made billions because he had millions to gamble with.

~~~
jimbokun
He had millions to gamble with because he started out soldering computers in a
garage and selling them to people.

------
ekvintroj
Stealing Alan Kay.

------
erichocean
Spoiler: Pixar.

------
myf01d
Steve Jobs, aka the visionary genius, everyone.

------
SCAQTony
I think what the article missed is that content creation is the most
profitable business model. Jobs' first billion was due to a creative invention
whose equity did not end on opening night, foreign distribution and DVD sales
but rather through trademarks, copyrights and of course the conquest of
different markets such as toys, books and clothing.

------
smitherfield
I've often thought about what it says that it took a pretty horrible person
like Steve Jobs to recognize and motivate talent to create great products.

