Steve Jobs would have been 65 on Monday. Here’s how the late Apple CEO saved the company from disaster and set it on the path to a $1 trillion valuation.
- When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, the company was in dire straits.
- He quickly staged a boardroom coup, becoming CEO once again and working to turn the company around via new products and an investment from Apple’s main rival, Microsoft.
- During Jobs’ tenure, Apple launched the iMac, iBook, iPod, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, and more. These days, the company is worth over $1 trillion.
- Jobs, who died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer, would have turned 65 on Monday.
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Back in 2018, Apple officially hit the $1 trillion mark, making it the first American company to do so, ever.
Much of that success is due to the vision of Steve Jobs, the late Apple cofounder. Without him, Apple as we know it today might not even exist.
Once upon a time, Apple was a disaster, chewing through CEOs and delivering one bad quarter of financial results after another.
In 1996, knowing he had to do something dramatic, then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio negotiated a deal to buy NeXT, the computer startup operated by an exiled Jobs, in hopes that he would bring some much-needed direction to the company.
Instead, Jobs staged a boardroom coup that resulted in Amelio’s resignation. Jobs had decided that if Apple were to be saved, he would be the one to do it — even if it meant getting help from the company’s rivals at Microsoft.
Here’s what happened next.
