The Woz Plan
What Apple's 50th anniversary should also celebrate
📡 On my Radar
Apple Computer turns 50 on April 1st.
Tim Cook is throwing parties and inviting influencers. He’s talking a lot about Steve Jobs, but barely mentioning Apple’s other cofounder: Steve Wozniak (Woz).
After Apple’s 1980 IPO made Jobs and other Apple executives rich, Wozniak noticed something: Apple’s very first employees, the team of young employees who had actually built the early Apple II computers, received none of the stock options the executives had.
Steve Jobs had cut them out.
“I will give him zero” — Steve Jobs on stock options for early employee Daniel Kottke
Wozniak considered this unfair and unacceptable.
So he created “The Woz Plan.”
He offered 80 early employees 2,000 of his own shares per employee, at the bargain basement price of $5 a share. Because of his generosity, many of those early employees went on to become millionaires themselves, using the funds to buy their first homes and putting their kids through college.
Had Wozniak kept his full 7.9% stake in 1980, he’d be worth over $237 billion today. Instead, he’s worth “only” about $100 million. He once said, “I didn’t ever want to be rich. What I have is more than enough.”
Unlike Woz, today’s tech billionaires hoard equity like oxygen. The notable exception? MacKenzie Scott, who has given away $26 billion since 2019, no strings attached, to HBCUs, climate groups, and community organizations.
Today, billionaires buy social media platforms and rocket ships. In 1980 Woz bought his team houses. That's the kind of leadership we need right now, and we should be celebrating Woz just as much, if not more, than Jobs.
📈 By the Numbers
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