CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — A scrawny hippie and a nerdy engineer who became prank-playing friends vowed to change the world when they founded a Silicon Valley startup on April Fools’ Day 50 years ago and then — no joke — pulled it off. The improbable odyssey began April 1, 1976, when a then-shaggy Steve Jobs and his gadget-tinkering friend Steve Wozniak signed a two-page partnership document that created Apple Computer Co.
The former home of Steve Jobs’ parents house in Los Altos, Calif., is shown on March 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Liedtke)
Jobs, a 21-year-old college dropout, and Wozniak, a 25-year-old Hewlett-Packard employee, each received a 45% stake in Apple, with the remaining 10% going to their 41-year-old adviser, Ron Wayne.The company got off to such a shaky start while trying to build a personal computer in the Los Altos, California, home of Jobs’ parents that Wayne relinquished his stake for $2,300. It proved to be a $370 billion mistake, based on how much his holdings would have grown now that Apple boasts a $3.7 trillion market value.
But Apple nearly toppled before building its current empire. After casting aside Jobs in a bitter 1985 breakup, the tech firm engineered a surprise deal that brought back its exiled cofounder in 1997. After reluctantly agreeing to be a temporary adviser, Jobs took over as CEO and masterminded an innovation factory that churned out the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad in a decade-long burst of feverish creativity.
