April 12, 1976
Ronald Wayne, the unknown third co-founder of Apple, decides to leave the company just 12 days after its incorporation, selling its 10% stake in its partners, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak instead of $ 800. If he had not, he would be one of the richest people on earth today, as Apple is worth almost 2.8 trillion. dollars.
Apple was born in April 1976 in the house of Ronald Wayne. The three business partners had met while working together for Atari and when they decided to work together, Wayne wrote down the terms of the contract they had signed.
Jobs and Wozniak would each have 45% of the company and Wayne 10%, in order to be the one to give the solutions in case the two Steve disagreed on an important decision. As the third co-founder would later say, his role was that of “adult in the room”since Jobs was only 21 at the time, Bosniak 26, but he had turned 40, with the result that his two business partners considered him more “balanced and reasonable”.
Wayne, in fact, was the man who designed the first Apple logowhich was used for less than a year, before being replaced by the symbol we know to this day.
But 12 days later, Wayne was terrified. Immediately after the signing of the contract for the establishment of Apple, Jobs did what he had to do: He went out on the market and struck a deal with a company called The Byte Shop to sell her computers. To make them, he borrowed $ 15,000 from Apple.
The problem was that Byte Shop had a bad reputation in the market. And that rumor scared Wayne.
“Jobs and Wozniak did not have a penny if you turned them upside down. “I had a house, he had a car, I had a deposit account,” he would explain later. “If the company was blown up, how would that $ 15,000 be repaid?” He thought at the time. And since his two partners had nothing in their name, he feared that he would be held accountable for this debt.
After all, he already had a bad previous experience, as when his slot machine business sank a few years earliertook him two years to stand on his own two feet financially.
So, just 12 days after the founding of Apple, he decided to leave it. As he would say laterhe felt that the business would be successful, but he knew that the road to success would have ups and downs.
«I was starting to grow too big. I was 40 and these kids were 20. Both of them were siphons. It was like holding a tiger by the tail and I could not follow them“, He would confess years later.
Thus, Wayne sold 10% of Apple for $ 800, losing the opportunity to become one of the richest people on earth.
Sure, If he had not sold that day, that does not mean that he would still own 10% of Apple. Steve Jobs’ initial 45%, for example, with the resulting capital increases, had fallen to 11% by 1980, when Apple went public. If Wayne had not sold his shares, it is estimated that he would now own 2.5% of Apple, and therefore would have a fortune of several tens of billions.
But, as he says, he does not regret his decision, “because I made the best decision based on the information that was available to me at the time». He did not even like this job. «I would end up in the filing department shuffling papers for the next 20 yearsHe told Business Insider.
In the early 1990s, Wayne sold that first Apple contract, which bears the signatures of the three partners, for $ 500. The document was sold at auction in 2011 for $ 1.6 million.
Today, Wayne has retired and lives in a caravan in Nevada, where he sells stamps, rare coins and various souvenirs. of his short time at Apple. The first Apple product he acquired was an iPad 2 given to him at a conference in 2011.
Money Review
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
