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Comment by jpmattia | Hacker News Reader

> Woz: And when Jobs (in the movie, but really a board does this) denied stock to the early garage team (some not even shown) I'm surprised that they chose not to show me giving about $10M of my own stock to them because it was the right thing. And $10M was a lot in that time.

I have to say: That speaks volumes. And Woz, if you ever happen to read this: It's still a pile of dough in the year 2014.

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Woz wrote that it was the board's decision and not Job's. But if you take a depiction of Jobs , Zuckerberg and Gates who are the most prominent examples of tech entrepreneurship, you get back-stabbing friends, socially unacceptable behaviors,a huge ego, etc. Given the fact that most of the times we get the sugar version of the story via Hollywood or books... I wonder if you have to be like that in order to get so high and what example all these important people had set for the ones who will come.

Were/Are Twitter's, FourSquare's, Google's, Paypall's, etc. Owners like that?

> Given the fact that most of the times we get the sugar version of the story via Hollywood or books...

Do we? I'd expect to get the version of the story that sells, which is likely to have added drama.

Might it be that Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates are more prominent than Page and Brin, precisely because of all the stuff we criticise them for?

Don't forget Bezos. My friend who was an early Amazon employee who worked down the hall from him tells me Bezos is a fucking psychopath.

Worth keeping in mind that the nicest people will still have a few people who hate them, and the worst people will still have a few people who love them - whether they're top CEOs or just anyone in life. That said your friend's opinion may well be in the majority, I've no idea.

Yes, but when someone is a nice guy - like Wozniak - there are always around him people who will let us know how nice he was ... as with Woz. No one ever pictured Wozniak as an egomaniac workaholic, although his skill-set was (apparently) extremely above the average programmer at the time and an ego-centric behavior would (probably) be acceptable by him also.. Since he was the one who crated Apple 1 and ][ after all :-)

Yes, Woz was and still is truly humble, kind and accessible, to the core.

When I was a kid, he autographed my Apple ][ reference manual (the new spiral bound one that replaced the old Red Book, with the fold-out schematics and 6502 assembly monitor rom listings in the back), "Have fun with your Apple ][. -Woz".

A short, to the point, motivational, practical call to action. I sure did!

Perhaps people do these things all the time, but it only seems consequential / makes the news headlines if the person doing it makes billions of dollars.

Wikileaks's founder falls under the huge ego/back-stabbing friends, socially unacceptable behaviors category too.

If I remember correctly (haven't seen it since 1999), _Pirates of Silicon Valley_ has a scene depicting Woz discussing this with Jobs, stating he's going to do it because it's the right thing.

I recently watched this movie (again) and can confirm that this is correct. Even though _Pirates of Silicon Valley_ also skims over a lot of stuff, it's a far better movie and way more factual.

Agreed. I also found it particularly odd that Jobs essentially covers the almost exact same timespan that Pirates did, even though they had another decade of material to work with.

Pirates is definitely the better of the two for a plethora of reasons.

They should have just put Pirates of Silicon Valley in theaters, as opposed to "Jobs". Sure, it wasn't just about the guy in the turtleneck, but it was fantastic.

I have seen this movie so many times I can nearly quote the whole thing. Definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

It is quite conceivable that a $28M gift now would be perceived to be less significant than a $10M gift in late 1980. (media leading us to believe that 1B is the new 100M and all of that)

It is also conceivable that Woz seems distant from this huge financial figure not because of his being a successful "one-percenter" but due to a fundamental disinterest in money.

$28,409,090.91 corrected for inflation.

That's CPI, yes, the general inflation indicator?

Tech salaries were lower then relative to other salaries, so if you look at it in terms of how much money it would have meant to people, it would probably be more than that. I believe people were also much stingier about equity then, so I expect they saw it as a kingly bonus.

Another way to compare it would be to look at what would have happened if they had, as many did, bought houses in Silicon Valley. That's a much higher inflation rate.

But the most fun way to think about it (and in some ways least accurate as well) is asking, "What if they kept the stock?" Google shows shares of Apple trading then for three bucks and change, so call it 3 million shares of today's stock. So that's $1.6 billion of Apple stock in today's market.

I think he meant even if Woz had given away $10 million today, it would still be impressive.

Yes, exactly.

Given the uncertainties and rounding involved, it makes (a lot) more sense to say $30M

No, it doesn't. What would make more sense is showing the calculation. Also it's nitpicky.

If you wanted to use significant figures, it would make more sense to say $28 million or $28.4 million. Going to one significant figure is overkill. Whether you trust the CPI or not, those that made it chose more than one digit for it. Also I feel it's just a coincidence that Woz chose a round 10. I think he chose to make it a round million, but it could easily have been 5 million or 15 million or even something that isn't a multiple of 5 million instead of 10 million, were the circumstances different.

I actually think it's borderline impossible to inflation adjust $10M 197x (for any value of x) dollars to today's money in any reasonable way, given the dramatic changes in lifestyle and how they affect any plausible representative basket of goods. So I profoundly disagree with you. If anything, there should be much more uncertainty than my $30M, that sort of implies between $25 and $35M (approx), still too precise for me. Your suggestions of $28M or $28.4M I feel are absurd. Although not nearly as absurd as using 10 full figures of significance. Finance is the only field where that occurs routinely, and I can never understand why nobody gets called on it (hence my original comment). I agree with you on the number Woz chose. Basically he was choosing a round number that was a "whole lot of money", and no doubt today he would choose an even bigger round number that's still "a whole lot of money".

I think people who care just get used to reading notes on the numbers instead of having the numbers sanitized before they get to them. I agree it's a problem but I think the best solution is to get more people to read the notes than to sanitize the numbers. I think the numbers should have most of their figures dropped, though.

yeah he's a good guy but when saying that i think he lost track of what is wealth to "common people". Heck even HN readers are much higher the average income and 99% will never get even close to 10M. Or probably 99.9. maybe .99. ;-)

I think his point was that $10M of apple stock was a proportionately larger portion of his holdings; had Woz kept all of his shares and donated $10M worth of stock today, he'd have far less.

But, cue the recent discussion of wealth addiction; $10M was and is enough to have a super comfortable life without working again.

Woz knows full well 10m is a lot of money. That's just his trademark humor at work there.

Yeah, I found that last sentence you quoted somewhat baffling. At the current exchange rate and inflation levels, $10M is about an order of magnitude more than I'm likely to make in my entire working career.

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