ENTREPRENEUR Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an
american film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur,
entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist. Disney is famous for his
influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. As the co-founder
(with his brother Roy O. Disney) of Walt Disney Productions, Disney became one
of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation he co-
founded, now known as The Walt Disney Company, today has annual revenues of
approximately U.S. $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted for being a film producer and a popular showman, as
well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created
some of the world's most famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, a
character for which Disney himself was the original voice. He has been awarded
four honorary Academy Awards and has won twenty-two competitive Academy
Awards out of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving
him more awards and nominations than any other individual. He also won seven
Emmy Awards. He is the namesake for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort
theme parks in the United States, as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney,
Disneyland Paris, and Disneyland Hong Kong.

Disney died of lung cancer in Burbank, California, on December 15, 1966. The
following year, construction began on Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. His
brother Roy Disney inaugurated the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971.
1901–1937: The beginnings

Childhood

10-year old Walt Disney (center right) at a gathering of Kansas City newsboys in
1912.

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, to Elias Disney, of Irish-
Canadian descent, and Flora Call Disney, of German-American descent, in
Chicago's Hermosa community area at 2156 N. Tripp Ave. Walt Disney's
ancestors had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny in Ireland. Arundel Elias
Disney, great-grandfather of Walt Disney, was born in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1801
and was a descendant of Robert d'Isigny, originally of France but who travelled to
England with William the Conqueror in 1066. The d'Isigny name became
anglicised as Disney and the family settled in the village now known as Norton
Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.

His father, Elias Disney, moved from Huron County, Ontario, to the United States
in 1878, seeking first for gold in California but finally farming with his parents
near Ellis, Kansas, until 1884. He worked for Union Pacific Railroad and married
Flora Call on January 1, 1888, in Acron, Florida. The family moved to Chicago,
Illinois, in 1890, where his brother Robert lived For most of his early life, Robert
helped Elias financially. In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved
to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his brother Roy had recently purchased
farmland. While in Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing. One of their
neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, paid him to draw pictures of
Sherwood's horse, Rupert. He also developed his love for trains in Marceline,
which owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran
through town. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming
train .Then he would look for his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, running the
train.

The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years, before moving to Kansas City
in 1911. There, Walt and his younger sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar
School where he met Walter Pfeiffer. The Pfeiffers were theatre aficionados, and
introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Soon, Walt was
spending more time at the Pfeiffers' than at home. During this time he attended
Saturday courses as a child at the Kansas City Art Institute. While they were living
in Kansas City, Walt and Ruth Disney were also regular visitors of Electric Park,
15 blocks from their home (Disney would later acknowledge the amusement park
as a major influence of his design of Disneyland).

Teenage years

Disney as an ambulance driver during World War I.

In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved
his family back there. In the fall, Disney began his freshman year at McKinley
High School and began taking night courses at the Chicago Art Institute. Disney
became the cartoonist for the school newspaper. His cartoons were very patriotic,
focusing on World War I. Disney dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen
to join the Army, but the army rejected him because he was underage.

After his rejection from the army, Walt and one of his friends decided to join the
Red Cross. Soon after he joined The Red Cross, Walt was sent to France for a
year, where he drove an ambulance, but not before the armistice was signed on
November 11, 1918.

In 1919, Walt, hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory, left home
and moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career. After considering
becoming an actor or a newspaper artist, he decided he wanted to create a career in
the newspaper, drawing political caricatures or comic strips. But when nobody
wanted to hire him as either an artist or even as an ambulance driver, his brother
Roy, who worked at a bank in the area, got a temporary job for him at the Pesmen-
Rubin Art Studio through a bank colleague At Pesmen-Rubin, Disney created ads
for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. It was here that he met a
cartoonist named Ubbe Iwerks. When their time at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio
expired, they were both without a job, and they decided to start their own
commercial company.

Expanding into new areas

As Walt Disney Productions began work on Disneyland, it also began expanding

its other entertainment operations. In 1950, Treasure Island became the studio's
first all-live-action feature, and was soon followed by 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea (in CinemaScope, 1954), Old Yeller (1957), The Shaggy Dog (1959),
Pollyanna (1960), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor
(1961), and The Parent Trap (1961). The Walt Disney Studio produced its first
TV special, One Hour in Wonderland, in 1950. Disney began hosting a weekly
anthology series on ABC named Disneyland after the park, where he showed clips
of past Disney productions, gave tours of his studio, and familiarized the public
with Disneyland as it was being constructed in Anaheim, California. The show
also featured a Davy Crockett miniseries, which started a craze among the
American youth known as the Davy Crockett craze, in which millions of coonskin
caps and other Crockett memorabilia were sold across the country. [79] In 1955, the
studio's first daily television show, Mickey Mouse Club debuted, which would
continue in many various incarnations into the 1990s.

As the studio expanded and diversified into other media, Disney devoted less of
his attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his
key animators, whom he dubbed the Nine Old Men. During Disney's lifetime, the
animation department created the successful Lady and the Tramp (in
CinemaScope, 1955), Sleeping Beauty (in Super Technirama 70mm, 1959), One
Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), and The Sword in the Stone (1963).

Production on the short cartoons had kept pace until 1956, when Disney shut down
the shorts division. Special shorts projects would continue to be made for the rest
of the studio's duration on an irregular basis. These productions were all
distributed by Disney's new subsidiary, Buena Vista Distribution, which had
assumed all distribution duties for Disney films from RKO by 1955. Disneyland,
one of the world's first theme parks, finally opened on July 17, 1955, and was
immediately successful. Visitors from around the world came to visit Disneyland,
which contained attractions based upon a number of successful Disney properties
and films.

After 1955, the show, Disneyland came to be known as Walt Disney Presents. The
show transformed from black-and-white to color in 1961 and changed its name to
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, moving from ABC to NBC,[80] and
eventually evolving into its current form as The Wonderful World of Disney..

Early 1960s successes

By the early 1960s, the Disney empire was a major success, and Walt Disney
Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family
entertainment. Walt Disney was the Head of Pageantry for the 1960 Winter
Olympics.

After decades of pursuing, Disney finally procured the rights to P.L. Travers'
books about a magical nanny. Mary Poppins, released in 1964, was the most
successful Disney film of the 1960s and featured a memorable song score written
by Disney favorites, the Sherman Brothers. The same year, Disney debuted a
number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair, including Audio-
Animatronic figures, all of which were later integrated into attractions at
Disneyland and a new theme park project which was to be established on the East
Coast.

Though the studio probably would have made great competition with Hanna-
Barbera, Disney had decided not to enter the race for producing Saturday morning
cartoon series on television (which Hanna-Barbera had done at the time), because
with the expansion of Disney's empire and constant production of feature films,
there would be too much for the budget to handle.
Legacy: 1967 to the present

Continuing Disney Productions

The Disney entertainment empire

Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme parks have
developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture, vacation
destination and media corporation that carry his name. The Walt Disney Company
today owns, among other assets, five vacation resorts, eleven theme parks, two
water parks, thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels,
eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television network. As of
2007, the company has an annual revenue of over U.S. $35 billion.

ENTREPRENEUR STEVE JOBS

Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is an American business magnate and
inventor. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple. Jobs also
previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a
member of the board of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the
acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in the 1995 movie Toy Story as an
executive producer.

In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula,
and others, designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially
successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs
was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven graphical
user interface which led to the creation of the Macintosh. After losing a power
struggle with the board of directors in 1984, Jobs resigned from Apple and
founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the
higher education and business markets. Apple's subsequent 1996 buyout of NeXT
brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO
since 1997.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd which was
spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and majority shareholder
at 50.1% until its acquisition by The Walt Disney company in 2006. Consequently
Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder at 7% and a member of
Disney's Board of Directors.

Jobs' history in business has contributed much to the symbolic image of the
idiosyncratic, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the
importance of design and understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public
appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both
functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.

Early years

Jobs was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née
Hagopian) of Mountain View, California, who named him Steven Paul. Paul and
Clara later adopted a daughter, who they named Patti. Jobs' biological parents –
Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian graduate student who later became a political science
professor and Joanne Simpson, an American graduate student who went on to
become a speech therapist – later married, giving birth to and raising Jobs'
biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson.

Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in
Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard
Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve
Wozniak as a summer employee. In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and
enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only
one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy,
while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food
money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Jobs later
stated, "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would
have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.".

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings
of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at
Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving
money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple
employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a
Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this
time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of
the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".He has stated
that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully
relate to his thinking.

Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a
circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell,
Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs
had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with
Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the
number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number
of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an
assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700
(instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.

Career
Beginnings of Apple Computer
In 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne,[ with later funding from
a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer A.C. "Mike"
Markkula Jr., founded Apple. Prior to co-founding Apple, Wozniak was an
electronics hacker. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for several years, having
met in 1971, when their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, introduced 21-year-old
Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. Steve Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in
assembling a computer and selling it. As Apple continued to expand, the company
began looking for an experienced executive to help manage its expansion.

In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as

CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Steve Jobs lured
John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you
want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me
and change the world?" The following year, Apple aired a Super Bowl television
commercial titled "1984." At Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24,
1984, an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic
audience; Andy Hertzfeld described the scene as "pandemonium." The Macintosh
became the first commercially successful small computer with a graphical user
interface. The development of the Mac was started by Jef Raskin, and eventually
taken over by Jobs.

While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, some of his
employees from that time had described him as an erratic and temperamental
manager. An industry-wide sales slump towards the end of 1984 caused a
deterioration in Jobs's working relationship with Sculley, and at the end of May
1985 – following an internal power struggle and an announcement of significant
layoffs – Sculley relieved Jobs of his duties as head of the Macintosh division.

Business life

Wealth

As of October 2009, Jobs owned 5.426 million shares of Apple, most of which
was granted in 2003 when Jobs was given 10 million shares. He also owned 138
million shares of Disney, which he received in exchange for Disney's acquisition
of Pixar. Forbes estimated his net wealth at $5.1 billion in 2009, making him the
43rd wealthiest American. Jobs has been criticized for his lack of public
philanthropy despite his wealth, particularly in recent years as other billionaires
(such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) have pledged significant portions of their
fortunes to charity As of 2006, Jobs had not appeared on national tallies of
charitable donations totaling $1 million or more, as compiled by Indiana
University's Center on Philanthropy. Although he may well have donated
significant sums anonymously, some have doubted this assumption, given Jobs'
equally poor track record on corporate philanthropy; after resuming control of
Apple in 1997, Jobs eliminated all corporate philanthropy programs as a
temporary cost-cutting measure until profitability improved. Despite the
company's record-breaking profits and $40 billion cash on hand, Jobs has not
reinstated a philanthropic division at Apple.

Stock options backdating issue

In 2001, Steve Jobs was granted stock options in the amount of 7.5 million shares
of Apple with an exercise price of $18.30, which allegedly should have been
$21.10, thereby incurring taxable income of $20,000,000 that he did not report as
income. This indicated backdating. Apple overstated its earnings by that same
amount. If found liable, Jobs might have faced a number of criminal charges and
civil penalties. Apple claimed that the options were originally granted at a special
board meeting that may never have taken place. Furthermore, the investigation is
focusing on false dating of the options resulting in a retroactive $20 million
increase in the exercise price. The case is the subject of active criminal and civil
government investigations, though an independent internal Apple investigation
completed on December 29, 2006, found that Jobs was unaware of these issues
and that the options granted to him were returned without being exercised in 2003.
On July 1, 2008, a $7 billion class action suit was filed against several members of
the Apple Board of Directors for revenue lost due to the alleged securities fraud.

Management style

Much has been made of Jobs' aggressive and demanding personality. Fortune
wrote that he "is considered one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs."
Commentaries on his temperamental style can be found in Mike Moritz's The
Little Kingdom, one of the few authorized biographies of Jobs; The Second
Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman; and iCon: Steve Jobs, by Jeffrey S.
Young & William L. Simon.
Jef Raskin, a former colleague, once said that Jobs "would have made an excellent
king of France," alluding to Jobs' compelling and larger-than-life persona.[68]

Jobs has always aspired to position Apple and its products at the forefront of the
information technology industry by foreseeing and setting trends, at least in
innovation and style. He summed up that self-concept at the end of his keynote
speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in January 2007 by quoting ice
hockey legend Wayne Gretzky:

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going
to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the
very very beginning. And we always will.
—Steve Jobs

Floyd Norman said that at Pixar, Jobs was a "mature, mellow individual" and
never interfered with the creative process of the filmmakers.

In 2005, Steve Jobs banned all books published by John Wiley & Sons from Apple
Stores in response to their publishing an unauthorized biography, iCon: Steve
Jobs. In its 2010 annual earnings report, Wiley said it had "closed a deal ... to
make its titles available for the iPad."

Inventions

Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in over 230 awarded patents
or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and
portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards,
power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages

Still in Many ways STEVE JOBS is one of the best Entrepreneurs in the world.