Steve Jobs, one of the masterminds behind Apple, has long been an inspiration for other business leaders to emulate. He was worth an estimated $10.2 billion at the time of his 2011 death, yet preached money wasn't a top priority.
“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn't that important,” Jobs said in a 1996 PBS documentary. This sentiment rang true throughout Jobs’s life, which he lived quite modestly considering his vast wealth. Even while CEO of Apple, which ranks No. 3 on the Fortune 500, he leased his car and lived in an “understated” home in Palo Alto, Calif., according to ABC News.
Jobs was more concerned with having an impact through his work—while simultaneously enjoying life. And shortly before his death due to pancreatic cancer, Jobs reportedly told Disney CEO Bob Iger to do the same.
Nearly a decade later, that advice was on Iger’s mind as he contemplated his own future at Disney, according to a report by The New York Times detailing his departure from the CEO role in 2020 and abrupt return two years later.
The late Apple CEO told Iger not to stay too long at Disney and to enjoy the good things in life, the Times said.
Apple didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment on Jobs’s advice.
In 2021, Iger told CNBC he stepped down as CEO when he felt as if he was becoming too dismissive of other views.
“Over time, I started listening less and maybe with a little less tolerance of other people’s opinions, maybe because of getting a little bit more overconfident in my own, which is sometimes what happens when you get built up,” he said.
But while Iger left his post as CEO in 2020, he didn’t completely step away from Disney. He remained chairman and stayed involved in the company's operations.
This ultimately caused friction with his hand-picked replacement as CEO, Bob Chapek. The board ultimately fired Chapek and brought back Iger in 2022.
“When the two people at the top of a company have a dysfunctional relationship, there’s no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional,” Iger wrote in his 2019 autobiography The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company. “It’s like having two parents who fight all the time.”
Representatives for Disney and Iger didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Iger is eyeing the end of his second go-around as CEO and is again thinking about succession at Disney. In fact, Iger is so keen on retirement that he’s “obsessed” with finding his replacement, he told Kelly Ripa in a podcast released Aug. 21 on Spotify.
“I think it would be safe to assume that I think about [CEO succession] all the time,” he said. “I could say that ‘I’m obsessed with it’ would be probably an understatement, and actually, the board and I established when I returned that that would be among our biggest, if not our biggest, [priorities].”
Other advice from Jobs
Jobs and Iger became friends when Jobs sold his animation studio Pixar to Disney in 2006, according to Iger’s memoir. Jobs also was a major shareholder in Disney and a member of the board of directors.
“I was fortunate that he and I had a rapport and struck up both a business [relationship] and friendship that became very special,” Iger said, speaking about Jobs, in a 2018 interview with Goldman Sachs. “I learned a lot from him."
Jobs isn’t known just for his technological advancements, but also for his sound management and business advice. He famously said he didn’t hire "bozos" and rather looked for people who performed strongly at their individual jobs.
“You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as that,” Jobs said in a mid-1980s interview.
He also emphasized the importance of mission and vision for a company as one of his top pieces of management advice.
“That’s what leadership is: having a vision, being able to articulate that so that people around you can understand it and getting a consensus on a common vision,” Jobs said in that same interview.
