When Apple was founded in 1976, it had three co-founders, not two. Alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak was Ronald G Wayne, an engineer who played a key role in the company’s earliest days.
Wayne drafted Apple’s first partnership agreement and was granted a 10% ownership stake. Less than two weeks later, he walked away.
Just 12 days after Apple was formed, Wayne sold his entire stake for $800. At the time, the company was an untested start-up operating out of a garage, with limited resources and significant financial risk.
Nearly five decades later, Apple is one of the world’s most valuable companies, with a market capitalisation approaching $4 trillion. Wayne’s former 10% share would today be worth close to $400 billion, according to Fortune.
Why did Wayne sell his stake?
Wayne’s decision was rooted in financial caution. In the company’s first days, Jobs borrowed $15,000 to complete a purchase order of “50 or 100 computers” from the Byte Shop, a retail outlet that had a history of not paying its bills, Wayne recalled to Business Insider in 2017.
“If we didn’t get paid, how are we going to pay back $15,000?” he said.
“Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I, on the other hand, had a house, and a car, and a bank account, which meant that I was on the hook if that thing blew up,” he said.
Unlike his younger co-founders, Wayne was not in a position to absorb that level of risk. Jobs was 21, Wozniak was 25, and both had little to lose financially. Wayne, then in his early 40s, chose stability over uncertainty and exited the company.
He later received an additional $1,500 to formally relinquish any remaining claims to Apple, bringing his total compensation for leaving the company to $2,300.
Wayne took an early retirement
Finances were not the only reason Wayne took his name off the contract. He also feared the experience would put the nails in the coffin of his career, Fortune reported.
“If I stayed at Apple I would have probably ended up the richest man in the cemetery,” the now 91-year-old recalled to CNN.
“I knew that I was standing in the shadow of giants and that I would never have a project of my own,” he echoed to Business Insider.
“I would wind up in the documentation department, shuffling papers for the next 20 years of my life, and that was not the future that I saw for myself,” he had also said.
