Apple's third founder refuses to submit to regrets
Reporting from Pahrump, Nev It's usually past midnight when Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple Inc. colossus of the tech world, and Silicon Valley's most adored franchise leaves his home here and heads into town. Averting his eyes from a boneyard of abandoned mobile homes, he drives past Terrible's Lakeside Casino & RV Park, then makes a left at the massage parlor built in the shape of a castle.
When he arrives at that night's casino of choice, Wayne makes a beeline for the penny slot machines. If it's the middle of the month and he has just cashed his Social Security check, he will keep battling the one-armed bandits until 2 a.m. Wayne is waiting to hit the jackpot, and he is long overdue.
If Ron Wayne, 76, weren't one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn't have turned out like this.
He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool's Day, 1976: Co-founder along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company's original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company's partnership agreement.
That agreement gave him a 10% ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.
But he didn't. Afraid that Jobs' wild spending and Wozniak's recurrent "flights of fancy" would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult in chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800.
In a place where risk and innovation are part of the accepted equation of change, he became Silicon Valley's ultimate what-if story Apple's iMadeAHugeMistake.....
