1976: Ronald Wayne, who with Steves Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer, sells his 10 percent share in the company for $2,300. We could precisely calculate what that share would be worth today, but that number would be instantly worthless on account of Apple’s eternally skyrocketing stock price. So let’s just say it’s in the neighborhood of $60 billion.

Wayne had met Jobs while working as chief draftsman at Atari, and subsequently became a sort of mediator between Jobs and Wozniak in the early days of Apple. He was with the tech fledgling only 12 days, during which time he designed the company’s first logo and wrote the trio’s partnership agreement and the manual for the Apple I.

But let’s go ahead and get this out of the way. It’s just money. Wayne went on to enjoy a very prolific and diversified career, landing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, becoming chief engineer at an electronics firm, and eventually opening his own stamp shop. He holds a dozen patents. He’s currently retired, living in Pahrump, Nevada. From time to time he goes to Las Vegas and tries his luck at the slot machines.

Wayne says that he made the “best decision with the information available to me at the time.” He certainly had the most to lose. Neither Jobs nor Wozniak had any capital at stake; should Apple have failed, the creditors would have seized Wayne’s assets. And his two counterparts – young, inexperienced and a bit rowdy – had every quality required to run the company into the ground, or make the road to success a very rocky, muddy, winding one flanked by lots of angry creditors.

He “just wasn't ready for the kind of whirlwind that Jobs and Wozniak represented,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in 2010. “I thought if I stayed with Apple I was going to wind up the richest man in the cemetery.”

Source: Various

See Also:- Apple Co-Founder Ron Wayne’s Long, Strange — and Sad — Trip