"I'm The Happiest Person Ever": Steve Wozniak Drops Zen Comment Dunk On Snarky Internet Critics Of His "Lack" Of Enormous Wealth

Apple was founded by three people:

• Ronald Wayne
• Steve Jobs
• Steve Wozniak

Ronald Wayne, a onetime co-worker of Steve Jobs at Atari, infamously sold his 10% founding stake back to the two Steves for just $800 plus a $1,500 note a few weeks after the company was incorporated. Ouch. That decision has gone down as arguably the worst business decision in history. Today, the same 10% stake would be worth well over $300 billion.

Yesterday, we did a deep dive into Steve Jobs' net worth at the time of his death in 2011. At his peak, Jobs once owned 20% of Apple. On the day he died, Apple's market cap was about $350 billion, which means a 20% stake should have been worth around $70 billion. Today, that same 20% stake would be worth roughly $680 billion. And yet Jobs died with a net worth of "only" about $10 billion, and just $2 billion of that came from Apple stock. The rest, about $8 billion, came from his Pixar-to-Disney windfall. When Jobs left Apple in 1985, he angrily sold nearly all but a single share of his original 20% founding stake. When he returned in 1997, Apple granted him a new stake equal to about 1% of the company, which explains why Apple accounted for such a small piece of his fortune at the end.

And what about Apple's other co-founder, Steve Wozniak? Woz designed the Apple II, the machine that helped launch the personal computer revolution, and at one point owned nearly 8% of the company. At today's market cap, that stake would be worth around $270 billion — enough to make him the third-richest person in the world. Yet Wozniak long ago chose a different path…

(Photo by © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images)

A Rocky IPO

When Apple went public on December 12, 1980, it was the largest IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. The offering instantly created hundreds of millionaires among early investors and employees. With a 20% stake in the company, Steve Jobs suddenly had a paper net worth of about $360 million. With a 7.9% stake, Steve Wozniak's holdings were valued at around $142 million.

But the celebration wasn't universal. Many of Apple's earliest engineers discovered they had been left out of the stock allocation entirely. Jobs, who by then had a reputation for being both brilliant and ruthless, refused to grant certain employees shares, leaving some of the very people who helped build Apple with nothing.

Wozniak was appalled. Unlike Jobs, Woz believed the engineers who poured their energy into Apple's early machines deserved to share in the windfall. So, without fanfare, he took about $5 million worth of his own stock and redistributed it among dozens of colleagues who had been left out.

That act cemented Wozniak's reputation not just as a gifted engineer but as a generous colleague who cared more about fairness and happiness than hoarding wealth. It also set the tone for how he would handle money for the rest of his life: something to share rather than something to cling to.

"I never wanted money, so I pretty much tried to get rid of it."

Steve Wozniak's decision to hand out Apple stock to overlooked employees in 1980 was not a one-time gesture. It set the tone for the rest of his life. From the earliest days of his wealth, Wozniak made it clear that he didn't care about stockpiling money or power. He wanted to share what he had and use it to make life better for others.

After Apple's IPO, Woz gave away roughly $10 million worth of his own stock to friends, family, and early colleagues who had been shut out of the windfall. By the late 1990s, he had donated more than $7 million to various charities, most of them in the San Jose area. As he later explained, "I never wanted money, so I pretty much tried to get rid of it."

Over the decades, Wozniak has poured tens of millions into causes large and small: from museums and arts groups to classrooms and animal rescues. He has consistently chosen to put generosity ahead of fortune-building, a philosophy that distinguishes him from many of his billionaire contemporaries. Some of his most notable philanthropic contributions include:

• Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose: Woz was the single largest private donor, contributing $1.8 million in the 1980s to make the museum a reality. In gratitude, the city named the street in front of the museum "Woz Way."
• The Tech Museum of Innovation and Ballet San Jose: He served as a founding sponsor of both institutions, funding science, technology, and the arts in Silicon Valley.
• Education Outreach: Woz "adopted" the Los Gatos School District, donating state-of-the-art computer equipment and even teaching hands-on computer classes himself to fifth through ninth graders. He also helped establish the Woz Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he had briefly studied before Apple.
• Digital Rights: In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which continues to defend digital privacy and civil liberties online.
• The US Festivals: In 1982 and 1983, he spent more than $12 million of his own money financing two massive music and technology festivals aimed at fostering community spirit. The festivals ultimately lost money, but Wozniak considered them a success because they brought people together.
• Disaster Relief and Hunger: In 2005, he donated $10,000 to the Humane Society to help care for pets displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Back in the 1980s, he gave one of the first office computers to the anti-hunger nonprofit Share Our Strength, helping them fight childhood hunger.

The Happiest Person Ever

On August 11, just last week, Woz turned 75. On that day, some anonymous users of a tech forum called Slashdot began commenting about Woz's dumb move to give all his shares and money away, implying that he should be a multi or even a $100+ billionaire today. To everyone in the forum's amazement, Woz dropped into the thread and responded with a breathtakingly simple and Zen explanation. Here's what he said:

"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out."

The Woz & The Wooz

In closing, I want to leave you with a random anecdote. When I was growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, there was a unique amusement park called "The Wooz" in a town called Vacaville about an hour north of San Francisco. The Wooz was an enormous maze. A blazing hot, outdoor maze made out of 8-foot walls on the side of a giant freeway. That's all it was. No roller coasters. No arcade games. Just a giant maze. And for some reason, people loved it. I only went one time. I remember being extremely excited for days and barely able to contain myself on the drive up. Then we got there and… you just sort of walked around a maze for a half hour. Anyhoo. A few months back, I wanted to see if there were any videos of The Wooz on YouTube. There are THREE. And one of the videos is an episode of a TV show from the 1980s called "That's Incredible." The show did a profile of a race at The Wooz that featured three contestants. One of the contestants was a 10-year-old kid. Another was a female Olympic basketball player. The third? For some reason, a 37-year-old surprisingly fit Steve Wozniak. Spoiler alert, Steve comes in dead last… with a huge smile on his face. Check it out: