Apparently Ron Wayne wasn't splitting hairs. Despite quitting after 12 days, and being paid off twice, the third Apple co-founder has doubled-down on his odd claim of still owning 10% of the company.

When Ron Wayne first raised this point in March 2026 at the Computer History Museum, it sounded like splitting hairs. He said that he had never sold the 10% stake he originally had in Apple, but he appeared to want to clear up a point of pedantry.

Since Wayne quit Apple, he strictly speaking didn't own the 10% and that's why he could never have sold it. This seemed like a tiny point of clarification, and no more.

But in a separate interview with Fast Company, Wayne says no. He means it, he means he never surrendered his 10% share.

"I was there at the beginning, I played a significant part. I was doing all sorts of work for them over a span of a few weeks," he began. "And that was about it as far as my involvement with them."

"But all along, from then to now, I still held and now hold, as far as I'm concerned, a 10% stake," he continues. "I never sold my interest in Apple to anyone at any time for any amount of money whatsoever."

If that were true, then in October 2025 when Apple briefly became a $4 trillion company, Wayne would be sitting on $400 billion. And so possibly wouldn't have needed a kickstarter campaign to fund him writing a book.

What really happened

Wayne had good reasons to pull out of Apple — if things had gone wrong, he would have been the one liable for the company's debts. But what he did was sever his part of the original partnership between himself, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

A sum of money had to be involved in such a departure, and Wayne agreed to $800 that he was paid. He has subsequently been dismissive of that amount, calling it a cheap tip for all the work he did for Apple.

But as of his agreeing to that figure, Wayne was out of the partnership, and out of Apple. A year later, when the more business-minded Mike Markkula turned Apple into a corporation, he even made sure that Wayne did not have any further claim.

This wasn't anything against Ronald Wayne, it was purely a pragmatic business requirement that all previous and possible claims be settled before incorporation. According to Owen W. Linzmayer's book, "Apple Confidential 2.0," Markkula bought the original partnership for $5,308.96.

It's not known why he paid that specific figure, but it is known that it was then split between all three original founders. They each got around $1,770, and it was expressly to relinquish all claims.

So Wayne does not hold 10%, despite his claims. He does not come in at number 2 in the Forbes 2026 list of richest people — behind Elon Musk, but ahead of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison.

Instead, even the contract he signed relinquishing his share has made more money than he ever did from Apple. In 2011, the contract for this and the original partnership sold for $1.6 million ($2.3 million in today's money.)