On February 3, 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s computer graphics unit from George Lucas for $10 million and renamed it Pixar, taking roughly a 70% stake. Pixar’s November 29, 1995 IPO priced shares at $22 and made Jobs a billionaire years before his 1997 return to Apple, and Disney later acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal.
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.
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 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.
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.
