Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [149]
Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.
Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.
A few months before Apple became a public company, Wozniak took up flying, bought a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and eight weeks after the stock offering, came close to fulfilling the last half of Samuel Johnson’s adage. Wozniak embarked on a weekend flying expedition along with Candi Clark, the daughter of a California building contractor, whom he had first met during a water-gun fight at Apple and who was about to become his second wife. They were accompanied by another couple and were supposed to fly to Southern California to pick up Wozniak’s wedding rings. Before setting off from Scotts Valley airport, located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Wozniak was jittery. He complained about interference on his headsets and his companions were equally nervous. Their queasiness was justified. When the plane left the runway, it rose about fifty feet in the air, touched down again, bounced a couple of times, reared at an angle, barreled through two barbed-wire fences, careened up an embankment, and tipped on its nose about two hundred and fifty feet from a roller-skating rink crammed with teenagers. A San Francisco stockbroker who arrived on the scene switched off the plane’s ignition and found Wozniak slumped in his fiancée’s lap.
After an investigation the National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of mechanical failure. Meanwhile, doctors examined the four injured victims. They found that Wozniak had bitten through his upper lip, smashed a tooth, fractured the orbital socket around his right eye, had double vision, and was suffering from amnesia. His fiancée, meanwhile, needed plastic surgery to touch up cuts on her face. Wozniak’s accident prompted dark headlines in the local newspapers: COMPUTER EXEC IN PLANE CRASH, APPLE EXEC IN GUARDED CONDITION. In the days following the accident, Jobs rented a limousine to ferry Wozniak’s parents to and from El Camino hospital. There in his bed Wozniak became frantic, refused food, and said that the government was plotting to blow up the hospital and take all his money. Though his doctors were divided on the issue, seven days after the accident Wozniak was