I've seen and used the phrase "NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money" for that acquisition, they didn't just replace Gil Amelio with Steve Jobs, they also had a huge fraction of their management and tech leads swapped out with NeXT folk in pretty short order. They also turned over a huge number of board members in '96-97 as Apple flailed then reformed. Apple spent $429M on NeXT (Apples market cap at the time was around $2B) when they were losing about $700M a quarter and expected to be bankrupt by the end of 1996. They slid through the bad spot partly on a $150M investment (...possibly motivated by antitrust avoidance) from Microsoft.
Steve drove (Chief Operating Officer) Marco Landi and (chief technologist) Ellen Hancock out even before he became CEO. Bertrand Serlet (1997-2009) then Craig Federighi (2009-) ran the (variously named) OS team and Avie Tenivan was the tech lead, all former NeXT folks (which makes sense because Apple failed at 3 OS projects then shipped reskinned NeXTStep). Bud Tribble followed Steve to NeXT then back to Apple in various VP roles. George Crow and Jon Rubinstein did the same kind of loop working on hardware platforms at Apple-NeXT-Apple. Mitch Mandich became SVP of sales almost immediately after the acquisition. Etc.
Steve drove (Chief Operating Officer) Marco Landi and (chief technologist) Ellen Hancock out even before he became CEO. Bertrand Serlet (1997-2009) then Craig Federighi (2009-) ran the (variously named) OS team and Avie Tenivan was the tech lead, all former NeXT folks (which makes sense because Apple failed at 3 OS projects then shipped reskinned NeXTStep). Bud Tribble followed Steve to NeXT then back to Apple in various VP roles. George Crow and Jon Rubinstein did the same kind of loop working on hardware platforms at Apple-NeXT-Apple. Mitch Mandich became SVP of sales almost immediately after the acquisition. Etc.