Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, right? Meeeecerror. Unknown to the general public, there is a third founder who few people remember. A businessman who preferred to free himself from the bonds of business, which he partly regrets and partly rejoices about. He designed the first Apple logo and was a serene man while those around him, younger, took life for a joke. And that’s part of what caused his downfall.
I’m talking about Ronald Wayne or “Ron” Waynethe third founding member of Apple, more primitive, and who did not enjoy the fame enjoyed by Jobs and Wozniak. Nor has it been done financially. Let’s review what happened and what became of this “third executive in the running”.
10% which is now worth hundreds of millions
Ron had his first adventures before he started thinking about Apple. In 1971, this engineer was already trying his luck by selling slot machine
And there you have it: Ron started working at Atari where he wrote internal documentation for their systems. And that’s where he met young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who kept talking about what the future of computing and the design of their computers would be like. Ron decides to lend them a hand: he invites them to his home and referees one of their debates, which leads to the decision to found a company. As a thank you, Jobs and Wozniak gave him 10% of the shares while the two would retain 45% each..
During his short time at Apple, Ron wrote documentation for the Apple I and created the company’s first logo. But their ambitions were not to work in this aspect of the business indefinitely: Jobs and Wozniak added ambition after ambition while he just wanted to design electronic products
Wayne therefore made a fateful decision: He sold 10 percent of his rights to Apple for $800, which, adjusting for inflation, would amount to almost $5,000 today.. Of the decision he said in the Telegraph: “I was getting older and those two [Wozniak y Jobs] They were hurricanes. “There were bumps in the road and I couldn’t take any chances.”
These 10% rights on Apple would be worth $300 billion today. A huge fortune that would have made Ron a multimillionaire over the years, even if in the interviews he has given he always says that he never regrets having sold it: “What can I say? I I made a decision based on what was known at the time. “No one could have predicted Apple’s growth.”
From Apple to a semiconductor company. And to a humble retirement in Nevada
After cutting ties with Apple, Ronald Wayne went to work at a company called Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. and later at LDF Semiconductors. His last days of work He made a living running a stamp shop in California
As is said in Cult of Mac, there were occasions when Wayne was invited by Steve Jobs to some of the opening speech from Apple, with first-class seats on planes and luxury hotels. He has had some presence in the company and continues to state that he does not regret selling his rights to it. The only thing he regrets: having sold the company’s original founding document to a collector for $500 only to later find that it had been sold at auction for $1.6 million.
At 89 years old, Ronald now lives in a Mobile home and Nevada. He insists on not constantly looking at the past because “it’s a waste of time,” as he told a local media outlet. He continues to sell collectible coins and stamps and entertains himself with slot machine casinos in the region.
An older version of this article was originally published on 11/15/2022.
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