MarcN

In 1975, Steve Jobs told Steve Wozniak that Atari had paid them $700 for a game they built together. He handed Woz a check for $350. Atari had actually paid Jobs about $5,000. In the video below, Woz says: "Who cares about money? Well, you do care about friendship and honesty." Jobs was working the night shift at Atari. The company wanted a new arcade game called Breakout, built with as few chips as possible. Jobs couldn't build it. Woz could. He already had a full-time job at Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs said they had four days. Woz went four days with no sleep. Both of them came down with mono. Woz did it in 45 chips. Atari's own engineers were using 150 or more. He took his $350 and was happy with it. Jobs took the rest and went up to Oregon to buy into a farm. About ten years later, Woz read the real number in a book about Atari. By then the two of them had built Apple, and Woz was a multimillionaire. If Jobs had just told him he needed the money, Woz says, "I would say take it all." It wasn't the last time. Before Apple went public in 1980, Jobs refused to give stock options to Daniel Kottke, his friend since college, who had helped build the first Apple computers. Woz did the opposite. He sold his own shares cheaply to Kottke and other early employees who had been left out. One friend kept almost all of a $5,000 bonus. The other gave away millions. Was Jobs a genius who knew what business takes, or just a bad friend?