APPLE'S THIRD FOUNDER SOLD OUT IN 12 DAYS

Apple was not started by two people. On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed a partnership agreement with a third man, Ronald Wayne, who took a 10 percent stake in exchange for being the tiebreaker between two headstrong engineers. Twelve days later Wayne sold his share back for 800 dollars. Ron Wayne's 10 percent of Apple would be worth roughly 400 to 500 billion dollars today at a 4 to 5 trillion dollar valuation if it had never been diluted, but it would not have stayed 10 percent, and Fortune puts the diluted range at 75 billion to 360 billion dollars.

RONALD WAYNE SIGNED THE CONTRACT, THEN TYPED IT UP

Ronald Wayne was 41, an engineer who had already started and folded a slot machine company of his own, when Jobs and Wozniak asked him to formalize their computer club into an actual business. Jobs proposed a split of 45 percent for himself, 45 percent for Wozniak, and 10 percent for Wayne, who would settle any dispute between the two more excitable partners.

The three met at Wayne's apartment in Mountain View and signed the agreement on April 1, 1976, a two and a half page contract that Wayne typed up himself in careful, self consciously legal language. It made the Apple Computer Company a general partnership rather than a corporation, which meant every signer was personally liable for whatever debts the business took on. Wayne was the one partner who actually owned anything a creditor could take.

TWELVE DAYS LATER, HE WANTED OUT

Wayne pulled out of the partnership on April 12, 1976, eleven days after signing it, because that personal liability worried him more than the upside excited him. He sold his 10 percent stake back to Jobs and Wozniak for 800 dollars, then later signed away any future claim on the company for an additional 1,500 dollars, a total buyout of 2,300 dollars.

The arithmetic is simple and misleading. Ten percent of a 4 trillion dollar Apple is 400 billion dollars, and Apple was reported at about 4.96 trillion dollars in late July 2026, which would put an untouched tenth near 500 billion. Wayne's tenth would not have stayed a tenth. Fortune notes that Jobs and Wozniak were themselves diluted as investors came in and Apple went public in 1980, and CNN made the same point in 2016, when it priced a tenth at about 62 billion dollars and said Wayne would not have come close to that figure. The 400 billion headline is a ceiling, not a payout. Apple was hovering near a 3.8 trillion dollar valuation in March as it prepared to mark 50 years of thinking different with a new Instagram account and a letter from Tim Cook. Now 91, Wayne says the decision still costs him no sleep. My success has never been defined by money, he told reporters this spring.

A STORE OWNER ORDERS FIFTY MACHINES

The Apple I, the company's actual first product, was a bare circuit board that buyers had to supply their own case, power source, keyboard, and monitor for, and it became a business only because a Mountain View computer store owner named Paul Terrell wanted 50 of them fully assembled. Wozniak had built the board as a project to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club. Terrell's order is what forced two hobbyists to become manufacturers.

Wozniak sold the board to Terrell's store at 500 dollars each and to the public at 666.66 dollars, a number he has said he picked because he liked the repeating digits, nothing more. Roughly 200 Apple I units were ever built. Jobs and Wozniak incorporated Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977, this time without Wayne, and brought in a former Intel and Fairchild marketing executive named Mike Markkula, who invested 250,000 dollars, personally guaranteed a bank line of credit neither founder could have qualified for alone, and became a one third owner and Apple's third employee. By 1984 the company Wayne had walked away from was demonstrating the Macintosh to Andy Warhol and Keith Haring at a nine year old's birthday party, a considerable distance from a board that needed buyers to bring their own power supply.

WOZNIAK SAYS THE GARAGE STORY IS WRONG

The garage at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, Jobs's childhood home, is the image most people picture when they hear how Apple started, and it has since been given historic status by the local government. Wozniak himself has said that picture is wrong. In a 2014 interview he stated plainly that the team did no designs, no breadboarding, and no prototyping in that garage, and that the first 50 to 100 Apple I boards were actually put together in the spare bedroom of Jobs's parents' house.

The garage mostly functioned as storage and, later, overflow assembly space once Terrell's order came in. Finally Offline's coverage of Jony Ive's design tenure has traced a company that spent the next four decades building an aura of inevitability around every object it shipped, and the garage myth is the same instinct pointed backward, a tidier story than an apartment contract and a spare bedroom actually were. Even Verdy's recent teaser tagging Apple's new Instagram handle leans on that same nostalgia, dressing a streetwear drop in the language of a company that supposedly began with nothing but a garage and an idea.

THE CONTRACT STILL EXISTS. WAYNE HAS NOT ASKED TO SEE IT AGAIN.

Wayne sold his own copy of the founding contract to a document dealer in the early 1990s for 500 dollars, a decision he has called the one thing in this whole experience he really does regret. That same three page contract sold at Sotheby's in 2011 for 1.6 million dollars, then sold again at Christie's this past January for 2.5 million dollars, the most anyone has ever paid for an Apple artifact. The company it created now sells more than 2.3 billion iPhones and, this year, handed Siri's brain over to a Google model rather than build one from scratch, proof that even a company built on doing everything itself eventually buys what it needs, the same practical instinct that made Wayne sell his own stake rather than gamble on Jobs and Wozniak's spending habits.

Two facts sit uncomfortably next to each other. Wayne says he has no regrets about the 10 percent, but calls selling the paper itself for 500 dollars the one thing he does regret, which means the man everyone assumes is Apple's biggest what if actually drew two separate lines between money that never bothered him and money that does. Both are true at once, which is why Apple, five decades and a Christie's auction later, still tells its own founding story with the third name mostly left out.

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