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Steve Wozniak reply about his 'bad decision' to sell his stock in the '80s: 'I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for'
(programming.dev)
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Context
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Stephen Gary Wozniak (/ˈwɒzniæk/; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname Woz, is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer programmer, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
Source: Slashdot Comment, by Steve Wozniak.
Apple was falling apart and on the verge of bankruptcy it was down to like 10 CENTS a share in late 1997.
The only reason they exist is because Bill Gates gave Steve Jobs a ton of money to stay afloat so long as he promised to make some charitable contributions to give back if the company got its act together (Apple under Steve Jobs continued to be one of the least charitable companies on the S&P 500, completely breaking his promise) and they got lucky cornering the market with the iPod.
So Bill Gates and the iPod are the only reason Apple has a stock value. If things had gone just slightly different Mr.Wozniak would have had $0 if he'd of kept the stock. Also, the stock value dropped like another 40% in 1985 after he sold off his shares before starting to rebound back up and just floating around 25 to 35 cents a share for over a decade.
Bill Gates didn't do that out of the kindness of his heart. He did it because the feds had Microsoft on their sights in an antitrust case and Microsoft needed someone to point at to say "See? We have competition"
That monopoly issue and fines had come and gone years before this.
Nonsense. They didn't reach a judgement until 5 years after Microsoft's 1997 investment in Apple, and it was appealed until 2007
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-microsoft-corporation-browser-and-middleware#district
That was the 2nd time they got in trouble. Not the first where the government was poking around on them for OS monopoly practices. You're talking about what happened around 1998 and it was mostly for using its size to crush Netscape as a web browser by bundling their own Microsoft browser for free, along with some other software bundled things. That suit had nothing to do with being a monopoly over operating systems or PC hardware. In other words, it had nothing to do with anything Apple was involved with at the time.
So he's trying to be the nice guy, not at all a 'poor' looser who "only" have $10M... What a stupid world we live in.
Let that guy be IMO, but he doesn't deserve a saint image just because he didn't get insanely rich.