Ronald Wayne went down in history as a man who could become Applu billionaire. When they were in 1976 Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne were officially listed as co-founders of the company, Wayne owned a ten percent stake in the newly formed company. Just twelve days after its official launch, however, he felt that he was standing in the shadow of two intellectual giants and decided to sell his stake for “only” $800.
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Without millions
"I was forty and those guys were twenty," he later said in an interview with Cult of Mac magazine, adding that if he had decided in AppIf he had stayed, he would most likely have become the "richest man in the cemetery." Ron Wayne could be described as an unlucky lucky man who won the lottery but lost the ticket. Unlike Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak, he never managed to become a multimillionaire. In order to be able to pay his bills without any problems, he is selling his entire Apple archive, including various original documents and other artifacts.
Ronald Wayne is 85 years old today and lives in a $150 home in Pahrump, Nevada, 16 miles west of Las Vegas. Social support checks and the sale of rare stamps and coins on the Internet are the source of his livelihood.
Never give up
Ronald Wayne was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934. After studying at the New York School of Industrial Arts, he traveled to California in 1956. He first tried to get into business through a company selling slot machines, but soon found out that he was not the most suitable candidate for business. But he was definitely not a person who would give up easily. Even when the company he founded bankrupted him, he always managed to pay those who worked for him. He then bought back their shares from the shareholders at the full price.
A fateful meeting at Atari and the first logo
In the 1970s, Wayne worked at Atari, where he became friends with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Wozniak admired Wayne for his years of experience, skills, and creativity, while Wayne valued Wozniak's friendly attitude: "If you had to choose between Steve Jobs and an ice cube, you would choose the ice because of his warmth," he said. Wayne admired Jobs' determination to always go for it.
When a little later Jobs founded Apple, invited Wayne to cooperate. One of Wayne's first tasks was to draft a legal contract that would define the roles of the three co-founders. Wozniak recalls in awe how Wayne drew up the contract "off the top of his head" in no time. According to her, Wozniak was primarily responsible for electrical engineering, Jobs was given marketing responsibility, and Wayne was to oversee mechanical engineering and documentation.
But Ronald Wayne was also the author of the company's very first logo Apple. It was in the style of a Victorian woodcut and depicted Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. Less than a year later, Wayne's logo was replaced by the familiar silhouette of a bitten apple - its author was Rob Janoff.
It didn't take long for Wayne to decide to sell his share in Appto sell for $800. “No one could have predicted what would happen.” App"It will happen," he said later.
When it became a company in 1980 Apple publicly traded, Ronald Wayne worked at a small company called LDF Semiconductors. He remained in touch with Jobs and Wozniak, and they met from time to time. Jobs invited Wozniak to San Francisco in 2000.ancisca to the launch of the new Macs, provided him with first-class airfare and a personal driver. After the conference, all three co-founders AppThey met for a long lunch in the canteen. Appand reminisced about the good old days.
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Don't regret anything
But the only thing that Wayne regrets, according to his own words, was the mentioned original contract, which for Apple created Not long after lunching with his former colleagues, Ron spotted an ad in the paper for an autograph dealer. He remembered that the said contract was just gathering dust and sold it to the merchant for $500. But it was auctioned in 2001 for 1,6 million dollars.
It seems that bad luck accompanies him for life. For example, in one of the interviews he shared how he was robbed of his life savings at the age of seventy. To replace the loss, he had to sell his house. He moved to a more modest dwelling and certainly does not give the impression of a person who would give up everything and complain about adversity. "Pro"I'll just get up and move on," he said. "I don't want to waste my tomorrows complaining about yesterdays," he added.
