The founding contract for a little company called Apple Computer Co. sold for US$1.6 million at auction on Tuesday. The contract, which was signed by Ron Wayne, Steve Wozniak, and the late Steve Jobs, was expected to go for a small fraction of that price.
Documents That Were Auctioned
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News of the auction, which was held by Sotheby’s as a Fine Books & Manuscripts event, broke on November 28th. The contract had been the copy owned by Apple’s third founder, Ron Wayne, but was being sold by a third party that acquired it in 1995.
According to Bloomberg, bidding on the document started at $70,000, more than 30 times what Mr. Wayne was paid for his 10% of the company 11 days after this very contract was signed. There were twenty people in attendance at the auction, along with six people competing over telephones and on the Internet. Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive officer of Cisneros Corp., was the winning bidder at $1.6 million.
Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th after many years of battling cancer, which is why the seller of this contract decided to auction them at this time.