So, in 1985, Jobs started a company called NeXT with his ambition and $12 million of his own money to build computers for colleges and researchers. Additionally, this week, a piece of the tech icon’s career history went up for auction.
Jobs made David Nagy, a product manager at Apple at the time, what he described as an “insanely great” job offer in 1989, one year after NeXT released its first computer.
Occupations offered Nagy a compensation of $80,000 each year, paid month to month ahead of time, to go along with him at NeXT. The role, which did not have a title, also came with a $5,000 signing bonus, options to purchase 5,000 shares of NeXT common stock, and coverage under the company’s employee healthcare plan, according to the offer letter that RR Auction was able to obtain.
The enthusiastic sentence, “I accept this insanely great offer!!! above a spot where Nagy was supposed to sign his name but it was empty. However, Jobs was unable to actually recruit Nagy, who remained with Apple until 1993.
The letter’s lot is currently listed as “closed” on the website of RR Auction, but the auction house has not yet indicated whether the letter sold. RR Auction estimates that the letter is worth more than $30,000.
NeXT was attempting to reorient itself before making Nagy an offer. Their initial $10,000 computer could not be sold to the educators and scientists it was intended for. According to a provenance letter that Nagy wrote and sent to RR Auction, Jobs wanted to hire Nagy to “develop product strategies and plans, third party partnerships, and marketing programs” just like he was doing at Apple.
Nagy added that while he knew NeXT was attempting to make headway, he actually laments turning down the gig.
would fail despite my love for my position at Apple, I clearly should have seized the opportunity.
Jobs was rehired in 1997 after Apple paid $429 million for NeXT, a computer software company that became well-known.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the $80,000 salary Jobs offered would be worth nearly $180,000 today. However, given Jobs’ abrasive leadership style and the lack of a job title, it’s also possible that the offer wasn’t quite as great as advertised.
Guy Kawasaki, who worked for Apple in the 1980s and 1990s, described the experience as “sometimes unpleasant and always scary.”
In a CNBC Make It contributing article, Kawasaki wrote, “You had to prove yourself every day in the Macintosh Division, or jobs got rid of you.” Many of us were motivated to produce the best work of our careers because he demanded excellence and kept you at the top of your game.
Jobs was born to a German-American mother and a Syrian father in San Francisco. Shortly after his birth, he was adopted. After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Jobs dropped out the following year. He traveled through India in 1974 in search of enlightenment and later studied Zen Buddhism. A year later, they produced and sold the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, gaining fame and wealth. In 1979, Jobs recognized the graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse-driven Xerox Alto’s commercial potential. This resulted in the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, which was followed by the groundbreaking Macintosh in 1984, which was the first mass-produced computer to feature a graphical user interface. The introduction of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer with vector graphics, to the desktop publishing industry by the Macintosh in 1985 marked a turning point in the industry’s history.
After a prolonged power struggle with Apple’s board and then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs was fired in 1985. Jobs founded NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for the higher education and business markets, with a few Apple employees in the same year. In addition, in 1986, he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm, which contributed to the growth of the visual effects industry. The new company was Pixar, which made the first 3D computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, in 1995. Since then, Pixar has made more than 25 films.
In 1997, Positions got back to Apple as Chief after the organization’s obtaining of Straightaway. Apple’s rebirth from the brink of bankruptcy was largely his initiative. He developed a line of products, beginning with the advertising campaign “Think Different” and leading to the Apple Store, App Store (iOS), iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store, in close collaboration with English designer Jony Ive. Mac OS X, which is now known as macOS, completely replaced the original Mac OS in 2001.
It was built on NeXT’s NeXTSTEP platform, giving the operating system its first modern Unix foundation. Jobs was given the news that he had a neuroendocrine tumor in his pancreas in 2003. On October 5, 2011, at the age of 56, he passed away due to the tumor’s cause of respiratory arrest. He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in his honor in 2022.
