Acquired

Podbit · Acquired

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

Explore episode Aug 10, 2026
Business
The $7.4B Pixar Acquisition: Steve Jobs Tells Iger His Cancer Is Back

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Aug 10, 2026 Business

The morning Disney was about to announce the $7.4 billion Pixar acquisition, Steve Jobs took Bob Iger on a private walk around the Emeryville campus and told him: 'My cancer is back and I don't know how much longer I'm going to live.' He offered Iger an option to back out. Iger had 30 minutes to decide. He kept the deal — and Jobs lived another five and a half years. This was why Pixar sold.

4m 5s

Where this was said

Disney Acquires Pixar (2006)

At 2:34:05 · chapter starts 2:24:30

Bob Iger had watched the opening parade at Hong Kong Disneyland's launch in 2005 and realized there were no Disney-generated characters in the parade from the last decade — only Pixar characters. The path was clear: Pixar needed to take over Disney Animation, not just be owned by it. His call to Steve Jobs opened surprisingly quickly into deal discussions. The terms: $7.4 billion in Disney stock, making Jobs the largest individual shareholder at ~7.7%, and Lasseter and Catmull would commute to Burbank two days a week to run Disney Animation while keeping Pixar intact in Emeryville with its own culture, email addresses, and creative autonomy. Both Lasseter and Catmull had been given the option to simply shut down Disney Animation — and chose instead to try to save it. On the morning of the acquisition announcement in January 2006, Jobs walked Iger around the Pixar campus privately and disclosed that his cancer had returned and he didn't know how long he had to live, offering Iger the option to back out. Iger chose to proceed. Jobs would live another five and a half years. The acquisition proved definitively correct: Frozen, Tangled, Zootopia, Moana, Inside Out, and Up followed. During one of their last dinners before Jobs died, he raised a glass: 'Look what we did. We saved two companies.' Pixar couldn't have survived independently without Jobs. Disney couldn't have survived without Pixar reviving its creative core.

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