VIDEO: Original Apple founding contract fetches more than $1 million at auction
The contract that created Apple Computers was sold at an auction in New York on Tuesday, just one of a number of documents planned to be auction. Expected to fetch $150,000, the contract sold for a final big of $1,350,000. With fees, the final price was just shy of $1.6 million.
The original contract that brought Apple Computers together, signed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne sold for $1.59 million including, auction fees, at Sothebys on Tuesday.
It was sold along with another contract from a few days later that released Wayne from his 10 percent stake in the partnership.
The documents were expected to generate about $150,000, but strong interest from a number of bidders drove the price up. In the end, the auction came down to two people before Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive officer of Cisneros Corporation, won out.
The documents represent Wayne's copies of the original agreements. He'd previously sold them to a private collector in 1994, 10 years after Jobs had been forced out of the company and two years before his return. Upon his return, Jobs turned around a company that was practically left for dead and brought about the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and countless other evolutions of the Macintosh product and turned Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the United States.
If Wayne had kept his stake in the company, it would be worth $2 billion today.
Jobs, 56, died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 5. Since his death, his biography has gone on to be the best selling book of the year and tributes to him have been many.
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