Ron Wayne isn’t nearly as famous as Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak but he’s nonetheless one of Apple’s three cofounders who helped the company get off the ground in the 1970s. For his work, Wayne was given a 10% stake in the company… which he sold soon after for just $800.
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What did he do with the whopping $800 he made selling off a huge stake in what would become the world’s most valuable company? Bloomberg reports that he stashed it in gold. It’s not that gold is an awful investment in and of itself, it’s more that it’s absolutely nothing compared to the killing Wayne would have made if he held onto his Apple shares.
“If Wayne put his $800 into a handful of gold bars in 1980 when Apple Computer went public, they’d be worth about $1,750,” Bloomberg writes. “If he’d held onto his Apple stock, he’d have billions of dollars today. As investment strategies go, don’t expect to see this one in the gold bug hall of fame.”
And it doesn’t sound like Wayne has learned his lesson either — the 80-year-old Apple cofounder began auctioning off some early Apple artifacts this week to raise money to supplement his Social Security. When asked by Bloomberg what he was going to do with the proceeds, he said he was investing them all in gold… again.
