Together with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, Steve Wozniak helped found Apple in 1976, launching a company that would later produce world-changing products such as the iPhone, iPad and iMac and reach a market capitalization of about $4.8 trillion.
But Wozniak told Grand Valley State University graduates in a May commencement address that building a tech empire was never his goal. “When you try things, they don’t have to be for obvious money,” he said. “When we started Apple, did I want to make money? Start a company? Start an industry? No.”
Wozniak said his motivation was creating a personal computer and earning the respect of fellow engineers. “I wanted other engineers or other computer people to look at my designs and say, ‘Whoa’ and appreciate me and my brilliance, ‘How did he come up with these things?’”
After taking a break from his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Wozniak took a job at Hewlett-Packard in the 1970s and hoped to build a career there. He pitched his personal computer idea to HP five times and was rejected each time, and eventually warmed to Jobs’ suggestion that they try building it themselves. That decision helped set the foundation for Apple and became part of Wozniak’s advice to graduates: don’t be afraid to take an unconventional path. “Don’t follow the same steps as a million other people,” he said. “Think: ‘Is there something I can do a little different?’”
Wozniak kept a small paycheck and gave away stock
At Apple’s founding, Jobs and Wozniak each received a 45% stake in the company and Wayne received 10%, a share Wayne sold back days later. In the 1980s Wozniak gradually sold much of his stock and gave some shares to early employees who missed out on equity and donated other sums to charity. Had he kept his original stake, his holdings could theoretically have made him extraordinarily wealthy—by some estimates he might have been a trillionaire today—but Wozniak has long been skeptical of accumulating wealth.
Earlier in life he said he typed college term papers for strangers late at night for just a few cents and tutored students not for pay but because he enjoyed those tasks: “When you had to type them on a real typewriter from midnight to 6:00 in the morning for a stranger I would never see again, I would charge 5 cents,” he said in the commencement speech. “If you do something you love—and I love typing—you don’t need to prove it by charging a huge amount of money.”
“I do not invest. I don’t do that stuff,” he told Fortune in 2017. “I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values.” Wozniak stepped back from full-time work at Apple in 1985, though he remained on payroll for years. In a 2020 podcast he said, “I’m still an Apple employee—the only person who’s received a paycheck every week since we started the company,” and that after savings and taxes he received “$50 a week or something” in his bank account.
He finished his degree and encouraged graduates not to rush
Wozniak grew up in California wanting to be an electrical engineer like his father and also considering teaching fifth grade. Education remained important: twelve years after cofounding Apple he reenrolled at UC Berkeley and eventually graduated at age 35 under an alias—“My Berkeley diploma says Rocky Raccoon Clark”—to avoid attention.
He later spent a decade teaching elementary and middle school students about computing. Reflecting on his own roundabout path, Wozniak advised graduates that they do not need to have their careers figured out immediately: “[It] doesn’t even have to be working in the job you want to do for the rest of your life,” he said. “Take some job to get enough money for an apartment. That’s the most important thing.” Acknowledging life’s inevitable uncertainty, he closed with simple counsel: “Do your best.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on May 22, 2026.
Source: fortune.com
