Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, commonly referred to as Pixar (), is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, that is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, owned by the Walt Disney Company. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time. Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface, used to generate high-quality images.
Pixar
The newly independent Pixar (1986) was headed by Edwin Catmull as President and Alvy Ray Smith as Executive Vice President. While looking for investors, Steve Jobs showed interest, but initially Lucas found his offer too low. Yet he eventually accepted after it turned out to be impossible to find other investors. At that point Smith and Catmull had been turned down 45 times; thirty-five venture capitalists and 10 large corporations had declined. Jobs, who had recently been fired from Apple, and was now founder and CEO of the new computer company NeXT, paid $5 million of his own money to George Lucas for technology rights and invested $5 million cash as capital into the company, joining the board of directors as chairman.