Key Takeaways
- Jobs paid $10 million for Lucasfilm’s graphics division in 1986 ($5M for the tech, $5M in capital) and renamed it Pixar.
- Pixar’s November 1995 IPO, a week after Toy Story opened, made Jobs a billionaire two years before he returned to Apple.
- Disney’s $7.4 billion all-stock buyout in 2006 made Jobs its largest individual shareholder, with about 7%.
Steve Jobs’ first billion-dollar payoff didn’t come from Cupertino. It started on 2/3/1986, when he bought Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division from George Lucas for $5 million, put in another $5 million to fund it, and renamed the operation Pixar while taking roughly a 70% stake. After Toy Story hit theaters on 11/22/1995, Pixar’s 11/29/1995 IPO priced at $22 a share and pushed Jobs into billionaire territory, years before his 1997 return helped remake Apple. Fortune’s 6/22/2026 look at Toy Story 5’s $312 million opening weekend is a reminder that Jobs’ biggest early bet eventually ended with Disney buying Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion.
A shrewd $10 million bet on computer graphics
It is easy, years later, to compress Steve Jobs into a single company. But one of the most revealing chapters of his career happened away from Cupertino, inside a tiny computer-graphics shop that most people did not yet know how to value. A Fortune piece published June 22, 2026 usefully ties that arc to hard numbers.
On February 3, 1986, Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division, The Graphics Group, from George Lucas. He paid $5 million for the technology and put in another $5 million as startup capital, totaling $10 million, then renamed the company Pixar. In that Lucasfilm deal, Jobs took roughly 70% of the new standalone company, with the remaining shares going to Pixar employees.
The long runway to the 1995 IPO
The bet did not pay off quickly. Jobs ultimately invested roughly $50 million of his own money to keep Pixar afloat as it lost money for nearly a decade. The turning point arrived with Toy Story, released in theaters on November 22, 1995 as the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film.
One week later, Pixar went public on November 29, 1995, in what was described as the biggest IPO of that year. The stock was priced at $22, and with Jobs owning upwards of 80% by that point, he crossed into billionaire status for the first time, per this November 29, 1995 IPO account. The chronology matters: Jobs did not return to Apple until 1997, meaning Pixar, not Apple, produced his first fortune.
How Disney turned equity into a lasting stake
In 2006, the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal under then-CEO Bob Iger. By then, Jobs held roughly 49.65% of Pixar, and the transaction converted his stake into about 138 million Disney shares worth approximately $4.6 billion at the time, making him Disney’s largest individual shareholder with roughly a 7% stake.
Disney has kept monetizing the franchise at a scale that looks more like platform economics than box-office trivia: since the original 1995 release, Toy Story has driven $16 billion in revenue to Disney, including consumer products, games, and publishing. Fortune noted Toy Story 5’s $312 million opening weekend in June 2026, a modern datapoint that traces straight back to Jobs’ 1986 decision to buy a graphics division and wait.
