Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak received a $50 weekly paycheck from the company for years. He sold his early shares and avoided investing to protect his values. “I do not invest. I don’t do that stuff,” he said. Wozniak preferred building computers over wealth, focusing on engineering respect instead of money.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak could theoretically have become the world’s first trillionaire had he retained his original stake in the company. Instead, he gradually sold much of his Apple stock, gave some shares to early employees and donated money to charity — reflecting his long-standing reluctance to make wealth accumulation a priority, according to Fortune.
When Apple was founded in 1976, Wozniak and Steve Jobs each held a 45% stake, while Ronald Wayne owned 10%. Wozniak later sold much of his holding during the 1980s, the report stated.
‘I didn’t want to be near money’
Wozniak has been open about his attitude toward money and investing.
“I do not invest. I don’t do that stuff,” Fortune stated him as saying previously. “I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values.”
His approach to work was similarly driven less by financial rewards than by personal interest. Wozniak recalled earning just pennies for typing college papers for strangers and tutoring students because he enjoyed doing it.
“When you do something you love—and I love typing—you don’t need to prove it by charging a huge amount of money,” he said in his Grand Valley State University in May 2026, as per Fortune.
Why Wozniak accepted a $50-a-week paycheck
Wozniak remained an Apple employee even after stepping back from full-time involvement in 1985. In a 2020 podcast interview, as reported by Fortune, he said he was the only person to receive a weekly paycheck from Apple from the company's beginning.
After savings and taxes, he said, his bank account received “$50 a week or something.”
The modest paycheck stood in stark contrast to the enormous value Apple would eventually create. Fortune reported that Apple's market capitalisation was around $4.8 trillion at the time of its October 3, 2026 report.
‘Did I want to make money? No’
Wozniak has said that making money was never his primary motivation for starting Apple with Jobs and Wayne.
“When we started Apple, did I want to make money? Start a company? Start an industry? No,” he said in a commencement address at Grand Valley State University.
Instead, he wanted to build a personal computer and earn the respect of fellow engineers.
“I wanted other engineers or other computer people to look at my designs and say, ‘Whoa’,” Wozniak said.
From HP rejections to Apple
Before Apple, Wozniak worked at Hewlett-Packard, where he hoped to build a career. He pitched his personal-computer idea to HP five times, but the company rejected it each time.
That eventually helped push him toward Jobs' suggestion that they build the computer themselves.
The decision ultimately resulted in Apple and helped shape Wozniak's philosophy about unconventional career paths. “Don’t follow the same steps as a million other people,” he advised graduates.