Apple's Long-Lost Founder Parodies His $300 Billion Mistake in Busch Light Ad

The Apple Computer Company was officially founded on April 1, 1976, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed this partnership agreement:

Both Steves were given 45% stakes in the new company.

But wait. 45% +45% = 90%. Who got the other 10%?

But wait again! There's a third name on that agreement: "Mr. Ronald G. Wayne."

Ronald Wayne is indeed Apple's third co-founder. And he did indeed receive the remaining 10% stake at Apple's founding. Unfortunately for Ronald Wayne, he sold his 10% stake in Apple back to the two Steves just a few weeks later for… $800. And then a little while after that, he received another $1,500 to clear out all of his remaining claims. So he received a total of $2,300 for a 10% stake in Apple.

Fast forward to the present, and Apple's market cap is $3.2 trillion. You're probably already doing the math…

If by some miracle Ronald held on to his 10% stake to the present, today it would be worth $320 billion. In recent months, that would easily be enough to make him the richest person on the planet (though Elon Musk's net worth has inched back up to $330 billion in the last few weeks).

Of course, Ronald Wayne never became the richest person on the planet. In fact, he never even became a millionaire.

After walking away from Apple in 1976, Wayne returned to a quiet life, working odd engineering jobs, running a small stamp business, and eventually retiring to a mobile home in Pahrump, Nevada. Over the decades, his decision became one of the most infamous "what-could-have-beens" in financial history — the ultimate example of selling too soon.

And now, nearly 50 years later, Ronald Wayne is getting the last laugh.

Busch Light just published a new commercial on YouTube. The concept? A tongue-in-cheek spoof of Ronald's infamous mistake. In the commercial, which is embedded below, Ronald tells the audience of a new "apple-related opportunity" that "you don't want to miss out on." The opportunity? A new apple-flavored version of Busch Light 🙂

Life After Apple

After cashing out of Apple for just $2,300, Ronald Wayne returned to work at Atari for a brief time before taking a job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He later launched a stamp and coin dealership, "Wayne's Philatelics," which operated out of Milpitas, California, until repeated break-ins pushed him to relocate to rural Nevada.

Despite walking away from what would have been a generational fortune, Wayne never expressed bitterness. In fact, he consistently insisted he made the best decision he could at the time. He was 41 years old, already had assets to protect, and had previously seen a business venture fail, which left him personally liable for debts. Under the original Apple partnership structure, he could have been financially on the hook if Jobs or Wozniak took on risky obligations. That was a bet he wasn't willing to make.

Wayne never owned an Apple product until 2011, when a fan gave him an iPad 2 at a tech conference. He eventually published a memoir, "Adventures of an Apple Founder," and a political treatise titled "Insolence of Office." For the most part, he's lived quietly, preferring tinkering, reading, and collecting over chasing headlines — or billions.

Now, with several cases of Busch Light and a grin on his face, Ronald Wayne seems to be having the last laugh at his infamous blunder.