SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — I finally got hold of my best Pixar source over the weekend to ask him about the death of Steve Jobs, and our conversation reminded me of something important: Jobs made most of his wealth by following an investment strategy that flew directly in the face of conventional Wall Street thinking.

In short: As an investor, Jobs took a long-term view, and he was rewarded for it. The patience he showed is the opposite of the short-term thinking that now pervades Wall Street and that pushes public companies to put quarterly results ahead of investing for long-term growth.

Hey Apple, show me the money!

Doing the latter takes guts, because companies have to make risky and expensive bets on technology if they’re to create and/or succeed in new markets, as the iPod, iPhone and iPad have done. Wall Street didn’t take kindly to the level of investment Jobs made in those products a decade ago, which is why Apple’s stock was sitting at $7 around the time the iPod was introduced.

It’s worth repeating this after Apple AAPL, +1.50% reported quarterly results that were stellar, yet which disappointed Wall Street traders, who’d let their euphoria for the stock push it up so high that it could only fall on the news. Read more about Apple’s earnings.

It’s true that Jobs became a millionaire by co-founding Apple and taking the company public in a 1980 stock offering, which made him rich by most everyone’s standards.

But it was Jobs’s $5 million purchase of Pixar from George Lucas in 1986 that ultimately made him a billionaire, after eventually selling the company to Walt Disney Co. DIS, -1.05% for $7.4 billion in 2006.

What my friend at Pixar reminded me of is what Jobs did after buying Pixar: He continued to pour more money into the outfit, by some accounts as much as an additional $5 million. More importantly, “he mostly left us alone,” said my source (whom I’m not identifying because he’s a friend and not authorized to speak to the media on Pixar’s behalf).

Apple’s Tim Cook with the late Steve Jobs Reuters

In other words, Jobs showed both faith and patience, and patience isn’t something most people think of when they think of his character traits.

Yet that’s what Jobs showed — for nearly a decade — when he let the creative types at Pixar keep hacking away, during a time when their only product was industrial-design software that appealed to a tiny niche of potential customers, according to my source. Making a hit animated movie was more a dream than a product strategy at Pixar.

Jobs allowed the creative genius that was percolating around Pixar to rise and blossom into a string of profitable movies, beginning with “Toy Story.” He had the luxury of showing patience because Pixar was a private company.

Contrast that with what’s been passing for corporate strategizing these days. Hewlett-Packard Co’s HPQ, +0.37% board gave Leo Apotheker about 11 months to work on his strategy of transitioning H-P to be more of a software and services company, then sent him packing. Does anyone at H-P seriously doubt that the company needs to move away from hardware so it can boost its operating margin?

Or think of Netflix Inc. NFLX, +1.32% , which waited less than a month before scrapping its plans to move away from mail-order DVD rentals to an all-digital strategy. The turnabout suggests a management strategy that gives more weight to investor relations or public relations than to long-term strategy.

Sure, Netflix customers were angry, and the suddenness of the move was a PR disaster. But reversing it makes it even less sense, given that Netflix rivals from Apple to Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.12% are pursuing all-digital strategies for their media sales and downloads.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook is now faced with a situation where a part of his investor base is made up of traders who won’t be happy unless Apple stock goes to $500, preferably within 12 months.

The fact that Apple disappointed these investors in Cook’s first quarterly report without Jobs is an inauspicious beginning for him, in their eyes, which is why the stock sold off.

But for the sake of long-term investors, and for the consumers who love Apple’s innovative products, let’s hope that Cook ignores any and all pressure from Wall Street. Jobs did that a decade ago when he funded the research that set the table for Apple’s current success.

I’ll end with a quote from top-tier venture capitalist Michael Moritz, who invested in Google Inc. GOOG, +0.01% in 1999 for Sequoia Capital, where he is a partner. I first used this quote in a May column on Jobs.

In November, 2010, I asked Moritz about the challenge to be faced by anyone who’s to succeed a successful, entrepreneurial chief like Steve Jobs. “The problem with replacement CEOs is that they tend to think as caretakers and not founders,” Moritz said then.

For all you Apple longs and Apple lovers, let’s hope Cook, like Jobs, thinks differently than Wall Street.