Ronald Wayne: Not even a free iPod. (Image by Wayne Kottke.)
It’s tough to say how Apple Computers co-founder Ronald Wayne would have spent $22 billion dollars, and we’ll never know for sure. Wayne was the minority partner to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the formation of Apple in 1976, and his ten-percent stake would be worth an insane fortune if he had held on to it. But Wayne, who had previously suffered through painful business failures, had misgivings about the wildly talented Jobs and Woz, so he sold his stake back to them after just 12 days.
Bruce Newman of the San Jose Mercury News caught up with Wayne in Pahrump, Nevada, recently to write the piece “Apple’s Lost Founder: Jobs, Woz and Wayne,” and asked him about what might have been. All these years later, he seems more baffled than bitter regarding his fate. An excerpt:
“It’s usually past midnight when Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple–colossus of the tech world, and Silicon Valley’s most adored franchise–leaves his home here and heads into town. Averting his eyes from a boneyard of abandoned mobile homes, he drives past Terrible’s Lakeside Casino & RV Park, then makes a left at the massage parlor built in the shape of a castle.
When he arrives at that night’s casino of choice, Wayne makes a beeline for the penny slot machines. If it’s the middle of the month and he has just cashed his Social Security check, he will keep battling the one-armed bandits until 2 a.m. Wayne is waiting to hit the jackpot, and he is long overdue.
If Ron Wayne, now 76, weren’t one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn’t have turned out like this.
He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool’s Day, 1976: Co-founder—along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—of the Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company’s original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company’s partnership agreement.
That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.
But he didn’t.”