The other Apple founder

Ron Wayne:

We don’t hear much about Ron Wayne, one of the three founders of Apple Computer in 1976. That might be because he gave back a stake that would be worth $22 billion today a mere 12 days after he got it from his partners, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It’s probably also because the now 76-year-old Social Security recipient left the ultraconnected Silicon Valley to live in a Nevada desert town that only got telephones in the 1960s.

But Mercury News reporter Bruce Newman (and photographer Karen T. Borchers) tracked down Wayne at his home about 60 miles west of Las Vegas in Pahrump, Nevada. And they got more than a slice of the down-but-not-entirely-out life of the man Jobs once wanted to be Apple’s “adult-in-chief,” resolving disputes between him and Woz, his equally headstrong partner. It’s a captivating profile that neither fawns nor pities one of oddest players in modern computing history.

Because you have to read it, I’ll only serve up some appetizers:

• Wayne was given a 10 percent stake in Apple, to 45 percent shares each for Jobs and Woz, meaning that he would have refereed any dispute. But he was afraid the boys — they were half his age — were so business-unsavvy and so assetless that creditors would go after him when things inevitably went bad. So he got himself out of the deal less than two weeks later, for $2,300. If he still had that stake, Wayne would be one of the world’s 15 richest people. Instead, he sells “stamps, rare coins and gold out of his home to supplement his monthly government check.”
• Wayne has never owned any Apple product. He only recently bought his first computer — a Dell.

Him one smart fella. He'd have been ultra-rich but would have had a lot of headaches too - and maybe even a few heart attacks. I've never owned (or operated) an Apple either. Now I'm going to read the rest of the story.