“On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs got together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to draft a three- page contract that established Apple Computer Co.,” Katya Kazakina reports for Bloomberg.
“Next month, the contract, with the three founding partners’ signatures, hits the auction block in New York,” Kazakina reports. “Estimated to bring $100,000 to $150,000, the agreement is one of the highlights of Sotheby’s Dec. 13 books and manuscripts sale.”
Kazakina reports, “‘This is a foundation document in terms of financial history, social history and technological history,’ said Richard Austin, the head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s in New York.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Brawndo Drinker” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Why this contract is not in Apple’s corporate archives?
Correction: I saw in the article that this is Wane’s orinigal.
Obviously, there should be at least two other originals (Jobs’ and Wozniak’s).
Also, it is interesting why Isaacson wrote that Wayne’s share of Apple would cost $2.6 billion by the end of last year. Obviously, Apple’s shares were diluted with additional investments from 1977 to 1979, and there were additional issues of shares. It is interesting to see actual calculations.
It would be really interesting to see the calculation.And using a little more math we’d be able to see what Jobs’ shares would have been worth today if he hadn’t sold them in ’85.
Jobs is easier case since a lot of already known: he had about 6.5 million of Apple’s shares back in 1985 and sold all of them but one.
Since that time Apple had three two-to-one splits, so now that quantity of shares would be 6.5 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 52 million shares. At current price Jobs’ shares would cost now 52m*$374 = $20 billion — ten times more than what Jobs received since he has returned to Apple in late 1996.
Yes, but would his shares, if unsold, have been worth $20B if he hadn’t returned? Also, he did pretty well, using those sold shares to buy Pixar and founding NeXT. Pixar’s $10M+ spent turned into over $4B for Steve and his family.
Yes, if Jobs would not sell his Apple shares back then, he would not be able to have Next and Pixar.
By the way, I forgot that Jobs was given Apple’s shares back in late 1996 when his Next was bought by the company. If he would not sell these shares — 1.5 million * 2 * 2 = 6 million * $374, they would add about $2.2 billion to his today’s fortune.
However, at the time Jobs decided that it would be “more moral” to have no Apple’s shares. Only years later he agreed to get new batch of Apple’s stock.