Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne has chosen the company's 50th anniversary to reveal that the conventional wisdom about how he got out of the company and sold a 10% stake in the company for $800 is wrong — but he's splitting a very expensive hair.
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne — but Wayne left after 12 days. Now at a Computer History Museum celebration for Apple's 50th anniversary, Wayne said that it wasn't true he had ever sold the stake in Apple he had as a founder.
"I actually never sold my 10%," said Wayne, and then repeated it. "The story that's been floating around for decades about $800... that I had sold [my stake] for $800, that was totally inaccurate."
This story, which Wayne himself has seemingly recounted before, goes that he was paid off with $800 when he decided to leave. He says that the sum was decided by a legal agent who proposed $800 only because there had to be some figure.
Wayne accepted that idea but adds that around two months later, he got a check, from Steve Jobs.
"I got an envelope in the mail from Jobs, containing no letter, no note, no explanation, nothing, just a check for $800," he said.
"And to be candid I thought it was a tip," he continued. "And a cheap one at that."
Later, when Mike Markkula made Apple a corporation, he sent a further sum to Wayne to officially buy him out the whole of the original Apple partnership.
That was a standard legal move to make sure there was no unsettled claim on Apple from Wayne. But whether it was Markkula's check or the original $800 one that did it, Wayne was dissociated from Apple and no longer had a 10% stake.
So it's true that he never sold that stake, but he didn't have it to sell.
What Wayne Did Next
Ronald Wayne is now 91. If his comments at the celebration were vague, he was surely just trying to put the record straight about the specific detail of whether he owned that 10% or not.
He was also a little vague when asked what he is working on now. Wayne announced that he and Charles Stigger of CMD Supplies, Las Vegas, are collaborating on a new computer architecture.
"[We] have developed a computer system that will run on 30% less power and will run not only faster than any other computer in the world," he said, "it will run faster than any other computer possibly could run."
There are no further details. Stigger's LinkedIn profile has a post from two years ago in which introduces "a dear friend, Ronald G. Wayne." That post was promoting a Kickstarter campaign for a book which Wayne subsequently wrote about money, not computing.
