Reporting from Pahrump, Nev — It's usually past midnight when Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple Inc. — colossus of the tech world, and Silicon Valley's most adored franchise — leaves his home here and heads into town. Averting his eyes from a boneyard of abandoned mobile homes, he drives past Terrible's Lakeside Casino & RV Park, then makes a left at the massage parlor built in the shape of a castle.
When he arrives at that night's casino of choice, Wayne makes a beeline for the penny slot machines. If it's the middle of the month and he has just cashed his Social Security check, he will keep battling the one-armed bandits until 2 a.m. Wayne is waiting to hit the jackpot, and he is long overdue.
If Ron Wayne, 76, weren't one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn't have turned out like this.
He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool's Day, 1976: Co-founder — along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — of Apple Computer Inc., Wayne designed the company's original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company's partnership agreement.
That agreement gave him a 10% ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.
But he didn't. Afraid that Jobs' wild spending and Wozniak's recurrent "flights of fancy" would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult in chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800.
In a place where risk and innovation are part of the accepted equation of change, he became Silicon Valley's ultimate what-if story — Apple's iMadeAHugeMistake.
"If he'd had the foresight and, more importantly, the fortitude to hang on for another six months, it would be a completely different situation for him," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst for Creative Strategies, who has covered Apple since 1981.
Although Wayne remains an obscure figure whose story is rarely told — and then usually as a cautionary tale — he refuses to second-guess himself.
"I don't waste my time getting frustrated about things that didn't work out," he said. "I left Apple for reasons that seemed sound to me at the time. Why should I go back and 'what if' myself? If I did, I'd be in a rubber room by now."
Moments later, however, he turns somber. "Unfortunately, my whole life has been a day late and a dollar short," Wayne said.
With Monday's unveiling of the next-generation Apple iPhone, the company's other co-founders can expect to see their personal fortunes rise. Again. Since the release of the first iPhone two years ago, shares of Apple stock have more than doubled in value. After selling and buying stock over the years as Apple became a public company, Jobs' stake today is worth $1.5 billion. Wozniak's Apple holdings are not a matter of public record. Neither responded to interview requests.
But even a few million would go a long way here in the high desert, especially in a town so near the middle of nowhere that it didn't get telephones until the 1960s.
Wayne was 42 and chief draftsman at Atari Inc. when he first encountered 21-year-old Steve Jobs, who was freelancing at the pioneering video game company after dropping out of college. Jobs had already met Wozniak, whose designs for a computer in a box he had seen at the Homebrew Computer Club, and now he was thinking about trying to sell them.
Wayne, who still lived with his mother, served as a frequent sounding board. "He was talking about the possibility of coming up with a personal computer," Wayne said of Jobs. "There were all these other things he wanted to do, so should he waste his time being focused on that? I told him that whatever he wanted to do, he could do it more easily with money in his pocket."
But he cautioned Jobs never to forget that the money was just a vehicle for creating things. "But he forgot," Wayne said. "He probably won't like me for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business. He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money. What can somebody do with $200 million that they can't do with $100 million?"
In Wozniak's autobiography, "iWoz," he recalls meeting Wayne and thinking, " 'Wow, this guy is amazing.' ... He seemed to know how to do all the things we didn't. Ron ended up playing a huge role in those very early days at Apple."
But in those early days, the free-spirited Wozniak was reluctant to commit himself, and it was driving Jobs crazy. "There were bits and pieces of the circuit for the Apple computer that Wozniak wanted to use in other places," Wayne recalled. "Jobs said, 'You can't do that. This is the property of Apple Computer.' He had an awful time with Wozniak because of the difference in their personalities."
