Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [147]
Michael Scott hooked up a speaker phone to the New York offices of Morgan Stanley and at the end of the day carted in a few cases of champagne to help celebrate the $82.8 million that had been added to Apple’s bucket of cash. Robert Noyce, vice-chairman of Intel, co-inventor of the integrated circuit, and husband of Apple’s director of human resources, attended the small party while Jef Raskin surveyed the other guests and noticed that “all the people in the room were millionaires. The forceful thing was that the world had shifted. I hadn’t seen that happen before.”
It was natural to be overwhelmed since there were so few precedents. At the end of December 1980 the paper worth of a few individuals should have been etched in uranium. Jobs’s 15 percent share of the company was valued at $256.4 million, Markkula’s at $239 million, Wozniak’s at $135.6 million, and Scott’s at $95.5 million. Teledyne’s Henry Singleton had a 2.4 percent stake in Apple that was worth $40.8 million. The venture capitalists’ investments had also crept up. Venrock’s initial $300,000 and its two subsequent investments had grown to $129.3 million, and Arthur Rock’s $57,600 stake had turned into $21.8 million.
Meanwhile, Rod Holt found himself sitting on $67 million, Gene Carter on $23.1 million, and John Couch, the head of the Lisa Division, on $13.6 million. The head of engineering, Thomas Whitney, who had departed on what was politely called a “two week vacation” and whom Markkula uncharacteristically dismissed in private as “a burned-out case,” found that his twenty-six months at Apple translated into a barrel of stock worth $48.9 million. Meanwhile, Alice Robertson, Wozniak’s first wife, discovered that her share of the separation settlement was valued at $42.4 million, though she later complained she had been the victim of a raw deal.
After the company went public, there were other complications. Some of the executives whose names and stockholdings were revealed in the official prospectus and newspaper reports started to worry. They installed extra fences around their houses, bought faster cars, wired up elaborate security systems, and fretted about the possibility of kidnap attempts on their children. Leslie Wozniak, who had been given some stock by her brother, retired from her work as a journeyman printer and was overwhelmed. “It was hard to decide what to do with my life. Anybody who wins a lottery should get a year’s free therapy.”
At Apple people found that they couldn’t sell the stock as soon as they had hoped because of legal restrictions. Others waited to cash in their three-year options and then retired, while many worried about the best timing for a sale. A sizable group even flew to Vancouver, Canada, on the day when 1980 income tax returns were due in order to qualify for an extension. Programmer Bill Atkinson complained, “Some people spent half their waking hours counting their stock options. Those who eventually sold their shares discovered that ownership was interpreted as a matter of loyalty. When Jef Raskin sold his stake, Jobs accused him of betrayal. Raskin countered, “I didn’t want to have to open the paper each day to find out how much money I had.” As a company Apple began to find it more difficult to recruit people because they couldn’t be made wealthy with quite as much ease as before the offering. Charts that plotted every hiccup and lurch in the price were tacked to the outsides of cubicles and had a discernible effect on morale. When the stock fell, the charts disappeared. Bruce Tognazzini admitted, “I went through a year of being totally whacko because my mood was entirely tied to the Dow Jones.”
For Jobs, Wozniak, and the other chief beneficiaries of the wealth created at Apple, the benefits turned out to be more mechanical than emotional. They, and others, learned that wealth and the prospect of leisure didn’t suddenly bring happiness and, to