Given the $7.4 billion price tag, it’s hard to blame Steve Jobs for selling out to Disney even if it means that his Pixar Animation Studios, one of the most successful companies in the history of show business, is about to be turned into Disneyfied rubbish. You can always count on The Magical Kingdom’s bean counters to smother creativity and success when the talent behind it is up for a raise. Take Miramax, for instance. After Disney bought the independent producer from Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1993, the brothers continued to run the company with the kind of panache that must have made Michael Eisner’s skin crawl.

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Miramax was a class act, and the company produced and distributed for Disney a string of box-office hits and Oscar-winners that would have done Walt proud: Sling Blade, The English Patient, Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat, Gangs of New York, Chicago, Cold Mountain, Finding Neverland. There were also some wickedly offbeat “small” films in the mix that gave Disney bragging rights on the festival circuit: Birthday Girl, Chasing Amy, Garden State, A Walk on the Moon, Rabbit- Proof Fence, House of Sand and Fog.

In the end, though, the Weinsteins were just too brash for Eisner, the epitome of the corporate stiff. The final straw for the brothers was Disney’s refusal to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s paradigm-shifting piece of agitprop. It went on to become the highest-grossing documentary of all time, vindicating the Weinstein’s commercial instincts if not their ability to champion truth.

And now Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest individual shareholder. Like he needed another feather in his cap. Perhaps if he can parlay the $3 billion he’ll bank from the Pixar deal a few more times, he’ll have enough cash to become a major stakeholder in Microsoft?  The Redmond company and its CEO are just Disney/Eisner in another line of business, desperately in need of the bold, unmitigated genius that Jobs has brought to everything he has touched.