No, he says he has no regrets. Ronald Wayne, the third founder of Apple – alongside the much more famous two ‘Steves’ – went his own way, just 12 days after signing the original contract on April 1, 1976. Wayne was bought out and sees a sloppy 260 billion euros pass by today.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak roll smoothly over the answer sheet as the quiz question passes who the founders of tech giant Apple were. The first also became Apple’s CEO in 1997 and is of course the best known, but Wozniak is still very popular. After his years at Apple, he regularly shed his critical light on new products. However, there was a third man who helped found Apple Computer Inc. on April 1, 1976. stood: Ronald Wayne. He is called the ‘forgotten founder’.
Ronald Wayne lives in remote Pahrump, somewhere between Death Valley and Las Vegas. The industrial electronics engineer is now 87. When Steve Jobs approached him in 1976 to become the third partner in Apple Computer Inc. At the age of 41, he worked for video game company Atari. There he ran into his 20-year-older Steve Jobs. Jobs regularly asked his colleague for advice.
One day, Jobs enlisted Wayne’s help to convince Steve “Woz” Wozniak, who worked at Hewlett-Packard, to work exclusively for Apple, which he didn’t want. Jobs and Wozniak had known each other since high school and enjoyed taking apart company computers to make personal computers. They were both members of the famous Homebrew Computer Club, an association of computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley. Wozniak stood out above the others there. One of the printed circuit boards he built would form the basis of the Apple 1, the first computer from the brand new electronics company. In 2015, that printed circuit board was sold at auction for $365,000 (€330,000).
Jobs saw in Wayne a better diplomat than himself. Wayne had to get Wozniak excited about Apple, because Jobs absolutely wanted him in the project. The site of the mission was Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View, California. Wayne got Wozniak this far in just 45 minutes. “It was then that Steve Jobs said, ‘We’re going to start a company. It’s going to be the Apple Computer Company,” Wayne said.
Ronald Wayne drew up the cooperation agreement on the spot and – to Wozniak’s surprise – typed four pages of all kinds of legal jargon, just from memory. The split was simple: Jobs and Wozniak each got 45 percent of Apple, Wayne 10 percent. Wayne also had to act as a rational referee every time the other two couldn’t figure it out.
But it didn’t last long, barely twelve days. Wayne had little faith in a company that had placed its first major order of 50 computers with Apple, which had to borrow $15,000 (over $65,000 today). Wayne feared that as the only entrepreneur with a house, a car and a bank account, he would have to pay for any debts. He withdrew from the company.
In 2016, he claimed that he still had no regrets and that his reasons were still valid in his eyes. At that time, Apple was worth about $600 billion, today it’s nearly five times more. Ten percent of that now amounts to a staggering 260 billion euros. That is certainly a lot more than the 1,500 dollar (6,750 euros today) that he officially received at the time as a buyout fee to waive all his rights to Apple. The two Steves paid $800 for his shares (today $4,000 or $3,600).
Wayne also made Apple’s first logo. He drew Newton under an apple tree, with the familiar apple above his head. The creative had hidden the letters of his name, RG Wayne, in the grass, but Jobs noticed anyway and told Wayne to remove the signature. As early as 1977, the first logo was replaced by the world-famous apple, initially in the rainbow colours. Today the Apple logo is monochrome.
Stephen ‘Steve’ Wozniak (now 71) left Apple in 1985, but he remained a majority shareholder. After his serious plane accident in early 1981, he had also been absent for a long time. He no longer felt respected. Woz had built the Apple II, which launched in 1977 and became the most successful PC until the arrival of the Commodore 64 in 1982. But in the early 1980s, Apple focused entirely on the Macintosh and the board, with Steven Jobs, pretended the Apple II did not exist.
Steven “Steve” Jobs left Apple in 1985 after being banned from serving on its board of directors. He then started the computer company NeXT. Apple acquired NeXT, and in the summer of 1997, Jobs became Apple’s interim CEO. He then became CEO until a few months before his death on October 5, 2011. Tim Cook succeeded him. He is Apple’s CEO to this day.
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