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Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull on how to argue with Steve Jobs

January 08, 2026

In 1986, shortly after being forced out of Apple, Steve Jobs purchased the Graphics Group of George Lucas’s production company Lucasfilm for $10 million. The Graphics Group was led by Ed Catmull and would eventually become the animation studio Pixar.

Between 1986 and 1991, Jobs reportedly poured over $50 million of his own money into the company to keep it afloat, often writing personal checks just to cover payroll.

When they first started working together, Steve had a reputation for being difficult so Ed Catmull asked him a question:

“What happens if somebody doesn’t agree with you?”

Steve replied, “Well, I just explain it to them until they understand.”

Ed and his colleagues at Pixar laughed nervously when they heard this. But in the 26 years that he worked with Steve Jobs, Ed says he never had a loud verbal argument with him.

“It’s not in my nature to do that, so I never had an argument with Steve,” Ed recalls. “But we did disagree fairly frequently about things. And the way it worked I discovered was I would say something to him and he would immediately shoot it down because he could think faster than I could. So we’d end the conversation, and I would wait a week. Then I’d call him up and give my counterargument to what he had said, and he’d immediately shoot it down. So I’d wait another week. Sometimes this went on for months. But in the end, one of three things happened. About a third of the time he’d say, ‘Oh, I get it. You’re right.’ And that was the end of it. And then there was another third of the time where I would say, ‘Actually I think he is right.’ The other third of the time where we didn’t reach consensus, he just let me do it my way and never say anything more about it.”

What most people misunderstand about Steve Jobs, Ed argues, is that he got more mature over the course of his life:

“You’ve heard about Steve in those early days and how he interacted with people and I was there for that . . . [But] what people don‘t understand is that Steve was so incredibly smart that he was learning from those mistakes. He was learning that certain kinds of overreaching got in the way . . . The way he delivered hard news changed with people and he became an empathetic person . . . And most of the people who saw this change in Steve then stayed with him for the rest of his life. That arc in Steve is unreported.”