Well, no one is perfect, even this intelligent man.
The Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. In exchange for 10% of the firm, Ronald Wayne was required to draft the partnership documents, write the first Apple 1 manual, and provide adult supervision for the young company.
In addition, he wound up designing the first Apple corporate logo. Four months later, the first Apple 1 computers went on sale for $666.66, or approximately $3,500 in current currency. The Apple 1 was an immediate phenomenon that paved the way for the Apple 2, which was an even greater success. Apple’s revenue in 1976 was $175,000.
In 1977, sales increased to $2.7 million. In 1980 Apple went public. The initial public offering made more than 300 Apple employees immediate millionaires; that year, sales totaled $117 million. Wayne was one of Jobs’ coworkers at Atari and was 20 years his senior. Jobs became especially enraptured with Wayne when he discovered he had experience founding and managing companies.
Before becoming Atari’s Chief Product Engineer, Wayne ran a few slots of machine-related businesses with moderate success. When it was time to establish Apple, Wayne was the ideal professional partner for the inexperienced Wozniak and Jobs.
Amazingly, only five years after its founding, Apple earned over $1 billion in 1982. Jobs and Woz were each worth hundreds of millions of dollars then. Unfortunately, Ronald Wayne did not live long enough to witness Apple’s meteoric rise; just 12 days after co-founding the company with Woz and Jobs, Ronald decided to sell back his entire stake for a paltry $800.
A few months later, Ronald received an additional $1,500, ultimately releasing him from all future claims against Apple. Let’s see it this way: $800 + $1,500 = $2,300, today, that is the equivalent of $3,000 when adjusted for inflation.
When Jobs, Wayne, and Wozniak founded Apple, they formed a partnership that made each originator personally responsible for any debts incurred by the company or any of its members. In other words, Wayne could have been personally liable for any debts incurred by these crazed 20-year-old hippie computer enthusiasts.
At the time, this may have been a genuine concern. Not only did Ronald Wayne already own several other companies and assets that he was unwilling to risk losing, but he was also skeptical that two teenagers with no business experience, who created a newfangled device no one had ever heard of, would be successful.
It is impossible to determine how much of his stock Ronald would have sold at various periods during Apple’s public existence. He may have sold some shares during the IPO or in 1985 when Steve Jobs was dismissed.
After being dismissed by the board of directors due to poor company performance, Steve sold all of his shares except for one. There are a million possible outcomes. Alternatively, if Ronald had held onto his 10% stake to the present day, based on Apple’s current market cap, he would have a net worth of $260 billion.
This would make him the world’s wealthiest person by approximately $70 billion. After being acquired by Apple, Ronald returned to work for Atari. In 1978, he departed Atari for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He worked for a while for a modest electronics company.
He subsequently owned a stamp store. Steve Jobs made numerous attempts over the years to rehire Ronald at Apple, but he resisted each time.
He authored a volume concerning the Constitution. He is a collector of devices and memorabilia; until 2011, when a fan gave him an iPad 2 at a tech conference, he had never owned a single Apple product. He has been retired and residing in a mobile home in rural Nevada for the past ten years.