On his 75th birthday, Apple legend Steve Wozniak pops up in a comment thread about his 'bad decision' to sell his stock in the '80s with a devastatingly zen reply: 'I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for'
If Steve Wozniak had "only" designed the Apple II, one of the foundational computers of the early PC era, he'd still be a computing legend. But after leaving Apple in the mid-'80s Wozniak went on to help establish the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sponsored the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, and has spent the last four decades on philanthropy, public speaking and founding a truly wild range of tech companies, like one focused on minimizing orbital debris.
What makes him one of the all-time greats though, at least in my mind, is that despite decades in the tech business and access to fabulous wealth he by all accounts seems to have remained an almost absurdly chill and normal guy.
Or, at least, as normal as you can be while playing in a Segway polo league.
Wozniak has millions of dollars to his name, but clearly chose to walk a different path than his contemporary tech billionaires like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison who accrued billions. And he remains the kind of everyman, old school tech nerd who occasionally reads—and even comments on—Slashdot. A few days ago (on his 75th birthday, no less), Woz popped into a thread about his ongoing lawsuit against YouTube over internet scammers who'd used his likeness, though not to address the topic of the lawsuit.
One commenter had piggybacked on the thread to point out that back in the '80s Wozniak had sold his Apple stock, which would be worth about eleventy trillion dollars today by my quick back-of-the-napkin math. "Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us," that Slashdotter wrote.
Then Woz popped up to reply, as noticed by Bluesky poster Caræsten. And it's definitely him—Wozniak used the same account for a Slashdot Q&A way back in 2012.
"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for," Wozniak wrote. "I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out."
Smiles minus Frowns, man. Just try to imagine Elon Musk typing that into a computer and meaning it.