There were three signatures on Apple's founding partnership agreement, and one of them belonged to a 41-year-old engineer named Ronald Wayne. He was the grown-up in the room — older than Jobs and Wozniak, with his own business behind him — and the two younger men brought him in to be exactly that: the tie-breaker, the steady hand. He drew the company's first logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I, and authored the partnership document himself, assigning himself a 10% stake.
Twelve days later, he gave it back. The arithmetic that scared him was sound on paper: a partnership makes every partner personally liable for the firm's debts, Jobs was talking about borrowing to fund production, and Wayne — the only one of the three with assets a creditor could actually come for — did the cautious thing. He had his name struck from the agreement and accepted a cheque for US$800. A later payment of US$1,500 settled any remaining claim for good.
The figure above is what he received. The thing he received it for is now one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world, and a 10% slice of it would sit comfortably among the largest personal fortunes ever assembled. The Bureau will not print that number in prose; you can run it yourself and we recommend a chair.
The Bureau's finding: like the man who bought the pizzas, Wayne reports no regret — he points out, reasonably, that had he stayed he might have worked himself into an early grave, and that he made the only decision the information available to him supported. We record the position with respect. We also note that “the information available at the time” is the precise phrase under which every entry in this Archive is filed. Case closed; the logo was, for the record, rather good.