Ron Wayne

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Ron Wayne at Macworld 2009

Ronald Gerald Wayne (born May 17, 1934 in Cleveland , Ohio ) is the third founder of Apple (along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ). He drew the first Apple logo and wrote the user manual for the Apple I . He also wrote the first shareholder agreement for the Apple founders.

Wayne knew Jobs and Wozniak from working together at Atari before they founded Apple in 1976. He received a ten percent stake in Apple, but quickly lost confidence in the company - in particular, he feared the liability that burdened each partner undivided. Wayne had been twice shipwrecked with a company and spent two years paying off the resulting debt. He returned his shares to Jobs and Wozniak for $ 800 just 11 days after founding Apple and returned to work at Atari; later he received an additional $ 1,500.

In 1982 Wayne's shares in Apple would have been worth 1.5 billion US dollars, in 2009 theoretically just under 13.6 billion pounds sterling (15.6 billion euros). By the time Steve Jobs died, his former stake had grown to over $ 30 billion. According to his own statements, however, he does not regret the sale.

"Would I like to be rich? Everybody would like to be rich but I couldn't keep up the pace. I would have been wealthy, but I would have been the richest man in the cemetery. "

“Would I like to be rich? Everyone would like to be rich, but I couldn't keep up with the pace. I would be rich, but I would be the richest man in the cemetery. "

In 1994 Wayne sold his 1976 copies of Apple's founding agreements for "several thousand dollars" to Wade Saadi, the owner of an IT recruitment firm. Saadi had these contracts put up for auction through Sotheby’s in 2011 , where they fetched around $ 1.6 million. Ron Wayne holds numerous patents. However, none of his inventions brought him the desired success.

Ron Wayne lived in Mountain View , California when Apple was founded and now lives in his own modest house in Pahrump , a small town in the Nevada desert .

Works

Web links

Commons : Ronald Wayne  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. a b c BBC NEWS Technology: Apple founding papers sold at auction for nearly $ 1.6m , March 8, 2012
  2. For sale - the costliest mistake in history: The contract where 1 / 10th of Apple was sold for $ 800 (now worth $ 35BILLION). www.dailymail.co.uk, November 30, 2011, accessed May 17, 2019 .
  3. ^ Financial Times Deutschland ( Memento of October 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Interview with Ron Wayne.
  4. Dave Lee: Apple at 40: The forgotten founder who gave it all away. BBC News, April 1, 2016, accessed April 1, 2016 .