39 photos of how Steve Jobs saved Apple from disaster and led it to rule the world

Nowadays, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, thanks in huge part to the vision of late co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs.

But if you only saw the movie, you got less than half of the story.

Once upon a time, Apple was a complete disaster, chewing through CEOs and delivering one bad quarter of financial results after another.

In 1996, knowing he had to do something dramatic, Apple CEO Gil Amelio negotiated a deal to buy NeXT, the computer company owned by alienated Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in the hopes that he would bring some much-needed direction to the company.

Instead, Jobs manipulated the board into getting Amelio fired, and decided that if Apple was going to be saved, he would be the one to do it - even if it meant getting help from their rivals at Microsoft.

Here's what happened next.