The Board That Fired Its Founder

What actually happened

The 1985 showdown wasn't a coup from nowhere: Jobs had recruited John Sculley from Pepsi, then fought him over the Macintosh's price and direction until the board had to choose. They chose Sculley. Jobs left, founded NeXT, and bought a struggling graphics company called Pixar.

By 1997 Apple had burned through two more CEOs and most of its cash. It acquired NeXT for $429 million, nominally for its operating system, and got Jobs back with it. The 'interim' CEO then cut the product line from dozens to four, took Microsoft's $150 million investment on stage in Boston, and began the run that produced the iMac, iPod and iPhone.

The board that fired him had been right about one thing: Jobs in 1985 was unmanageable. The decade in exile is where he learned the discipline Apple bought back: NeXT's failure to sell hardware, Pixar's slow grind to Toy Story.

The longer arc

Sculley did not last much longer than the man he replaced. He ran Apple until 1993, when its own board pushed him out too, after the Newton handheld flopped and market share kept sliding. Michael Spindler and then Gil Amelio each took a turn as CEO afterward, and neither reversed the decline that made buying NeXT necessary in the first place. The board that had trusted a professional manager over its founder in 1985 spent the next twelve years testing every alternative before it ran out of them.

Jobs never went back to being an ordinary founder. He ran Apple until months before his death from pancreatic cancer on October 5, 2011, at 56. Under his leadership, and then Tim Cook's, the company that had been ninety days from insolvency in 1997 became the first, in August 2018, to reach a trillion dollars in market value, and later passed three trillion. Sculley, for his part, moved through a string of smaller ventures afterward and has spent much of his later career giving talks about the man the board once chose him over.