From a humble beginning, Steve Jobs started Apple with Steve
Wozniak and Mike Markkula. Jobs invested his Volkswagen bus valued at $1,500
and Wozniak invested his calculator, valued at US$250.
From the investment of US$1,500, Steve Jobs became every body’s
hero and a billion in America. But before then, he ‘stayed hungry and stayed
foolish’. When Apple began to expand, the company looked for an experienced
executive to help manage its expansion. So many people came on Board as well as
investors. Steve Job lured Sculley John in to Apple away from Pepsi- Cola by
asking him whether he would like to sell sugar water for the rest of his life
or join him to change the world. Whiles
most of Jobs’ employee thought he was too temperamental, he stood by his principles
and gets the job done at all times.
An internal power struggle at Apple and redundancies at the
time made Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties. The Co-founder was fired. To Steve, "The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure
about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my
life."
Jobs owned 7.5 million shares when they went public and with
an IPO price of $22 per share that makes his $1,500 investment in 1976 worth
$217 million in 1980.
Steve Jobs left Apple to start NeXT Computer in 1985 with $7
million and when things were going bad, the Billionaire Ross Perot invested a
lot of money in the company.
Steve later bought The Graphic Group (Pixar) for $10 million
of which $5 million was given as capital. After some time, Jobs announced that Disney
had agreed to buy Pixar which was worth about 7.4 billion. This transaction
made him the largest individual shareholder with about 7% stock holdings in the
company. The sale of Pixar to Disney brought the largest impact to his net worth
valued at above $7 billion today. Along
with the sale of Pixar, Jobs gained a seat on the Disney board and increased
his net worth to more than $5.1 billion from a worth of 4.3 billion
representing 138 million shares in Disney.
Apple Inc. bought NeXT Computers for US$429 million in 1996
and that was how Steve Jobs came back to his company. At the 2000 Macworld Expo,
Jobs became the permanent CEO of Apple Inc. but in August 2011, Jobs resigned
as CEO, but remained at the company as chairman of the company's board and
director on Disney board.
Money is not the key motivator for Steve Jobs but he died a Billionaire
(has a net worth of $8.3 billion as of March 2011), a great
contributor to the American Capital market and an inspiration to young
entrepreneurs or business owners.
Courtesy: Market Watch, Wikipedia, Investopedia, Forbes and Apple Inc.
