Sept. 16 is an important day in the history of Apple—you know, the world’s largest company who makes devices we see and use every day—for two reasons.
On this day in 1985, Apple board chairman and co-founder Steve Jobs quit after the board sided with CEO John Sculley in a leadership dispute. Jobs took a bunch of employees with him to his new computer company, NeXT Inc., aiming to do what his old company did, but better.
While the new company was never a massive success, Jobs still became a billionaire from investments in Pixar when the animation company was in an early, turbulent phase.
In December 1996, his old startup showed up to buy his new one. NeXT’s computers weren’t better than Apple’s, but its software was pretty forward-looking. The company was sold for $400 million, and Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO on—you guessed it—Sept. 16, 1997. Read more here and here.
