What if Steve Jobs hadn’t bought a computer graphics company from George Lucas?
It’s the greatest side business in business history. In 1986, while Steve Jobs was ramping up NeXT, he also paid $5 million to buy Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division. It was mostly a hardware company at the time, but it hired some animators (including Disney expatriate John Lasseter) to makee wonderful little cartoons to show off its technology. Eventually, Lasseter and crew started making wonderful feature-length cartoons, and animation was changed forever. Jobs deserves huge credit for seeing Pixar through some extremely thin years at the start–and he made vast profits when Disney, inevitably, acquired the company in 2006. Harry’s guess: John Lasseter would have made fabulous animated films for somebody, but the special place that is Pixar might not have come to be if it had remained part of Lucasfilm. And the world would have been a sadder place, without ever knowing what it had missed.
