Steve Wozniak

Male

White (Polish and German descent)

Coarse public-record coding; race is a noisy, interpretive category.

Polish and German heritage on both sides; holds U.S. citizenship by birth and later obtained Polish and Serbian citizenship through ancestry and honorary programs, unrelated to his upbringing.

Multi-generation American descendant; his father Francis "Jerry" Wozniak was a native-born electrical engineer, not an immigrant.

not established

Not clearly established. As an adult he has described himself as atheist or agnostic; no documented account of the family's religious practice during his childhood.

English

Grew up in his parents' home in the San Jose/Sunnyvale area, a stable, owned household he could and did return to throughout his twenties; never at risk during Apple's founding.

Held a salaried engineering job at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators through the years he was building the Apple I on the side, giving him a steady paycheck the entire time Apple was forming, unlike Jobs, who had no comparable job.

not established

No documented housing, food, or income instability at any point.

not established

Not applicable in the way it is for Jobs; there is no documented period of visible poverty, chosen or otherwise, in Wozniak's record.

Father Francis "Jerry" Wozniak was an electrical engineer at Lockheed Corporation; mother Margaret Louise Wozniak (née Kern) was from Washington state, her occupation not established in the public record.

Neither parent was self-employed.

Father was a salaried Lockheed engineer, not self-employed.

Father held an engineering degree and worked as a professional engineer; mother's education not established.

2

A brother, Mark, and a sister, Leslie.

His father personally taught him electronics from a young age and told him engineers, not salesmen, "changed the world," treating his technical obsession as worth serious attention rather than a distraction from school.

Raised in San Jose and the surrounding Santa Clara Valley, inside the same emerging electronics corridor that would shortly be named Silicon Valley.

Homestead High School in Cupertino, the same public school Steve Jobs later attended.

Grew up with an electrical-engineer father and, more broadly, inside the same dense concentration of defense and electronics engineers that shaped the Jobs household a few miles away.

not established

Lockheed was aerospace/defense, not computing; his father's job did not provide a direct entry point into the personal-computer industry, even though it supplied engineering fluency and encouragement.

The Homebrew Computer Club, a Bay Area hobbyist group where Wozniak demonstrated the machine that became the Apple I before Apple existed as a company.

Steve Jobs, introduced by mutual friend Bill Fernandez in 1971, when Wozniak was 21 and Jobs was 16. Wozniak supplied the engineering; Jobs supplied the product sense and the sales.

not established

Exact age at his first Hewlett-Packard job is not precisely documented.

1

Hewlett-Packard, before co-founding Apple.

Had hands-on access to computers and engineering equipment as a teenager, well ahead of public availability, through his own electronics hobby and his HP job designing calculators.

Attended the University of Colorado Boulder (expelled after his first year for hacking the university's computer system), then De Anza College, then transferred to UC Berkeley in 1971 to study electrical engineering and computer science. Left before finishing to work and build Apple, then returned years later, after Apple had made him independently wealthy, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1986 under the pseudonym "Rocky Raccoon Clark" so as not to draw attention.

not established

Not established; he was already wealthy by the time he completed the degree.

A multi-stop path: University of Colorado Boulder, then De Anza College, then UC Berkeley, interrupted by leaving to build Apple, then completed under an assumed name in 1986.

He and Jobs raised the roughly $1,300 needed for the first batch of Apple I circuit boards by selling Wozniak's HP-65 calculator for about $500 and Jobs's Volkswagen van for about $1,500.

Mike Markkula, a retired Intel millionaire, personally invested $250,000 for a third of the company in early 1977 and wrote Apple's first business plan, converting a two-person partnership into a venture-backed company.

Held a stake reported at roughly 7.9-8.7% of Apple at the 1980 IPO, a position close to, though somewhat smaller than, Jobs's own reported stake; both were diluted by Markkula's investment from the start.

Rather than deploying his Apple windfall into further ventures the way Jobs redeployed his own into NeXT and Pixar, Wozniak sold roughly $10 million of stock to early employees ahead of the IPO at reduced prices, sold most of his remaining shares over time, and channeled a large share of what remained into philanthropy and teaching rather than building a second fortune.

Self-generated: a hobbyist personal-computer board Wozniak designed for his own use and to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club, ahead of any market plan.

Before Apple, he and Jobs built and sold "blue boxes," illegal devices that spoofed AT&T's network tones to place free long-distance calls. Wozniak has spoken openly about this in his own accounts of the friendship, describing it as lucrative and as the first thing he and Jobs ever built and sold together.

Self-admitted by the subject in his own retellings (including his autobiography "iWoz"), not an allegation or inference.

0

Apple was his first company and succeeded; no failed ventures preceded it.

25

Age at Apple's founding, April 1976 (born August 1950).

Founded Apple in 1976 at the start of the hobbyist personal-computer market, with the Homebrew Computer Club supplying both the technical community and the first audience for his design.

25

9

1976 to his 1985 departure from day-to-day work, the active window in which his stake could have compounded before he began converting it into cash and giveaways; unlike Jobs, he did not redeploy the proceeds into a second multi-decade venture.

Personal computer hardware design

100000000

No SEC filing, court record, or Forbes profile lists a definitive figure for Wozniak. Aggregator and journalistic estimates diverge widely: Celebrity Net Worth put the figure as low as $10 million as of 2026, citing his own statements about giving away the "vast majority" of his Apple wealth to charity and early employees; other outlets, citing a CNBC Make It estimate, cluster around $100 million; still others report $120-160 million. This is coded at the middle, best-corroborated figure, with the wide spread itself treated as part of the finding: even the estimate of his wealth is uncertain in a way Jobs's, drawn from public Apple and Disney stock, was not.

Journalistic estimate

2026

Aggregator estimate, not tied to a single dated filing or ranking.

His remaining wealth is mostly the residue of Apple stock he chose not to sell down to zero, plus decades of speaking fees; he has said he does not invest. Apple has also paid him a stipend, reported around $120,000 a year, for continuing to represent the company publicly after 1985.

Extensive cultural stature and honors independent of wealth: the National Medal of Technology (1985, with Jobs), the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the Heinz Award, founding funder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and years spent personally teaching computer classes to grade-school students.

Uncapped

Structurally uncapped, publicly traded founder equity, identical in kind to Jobs's. What differs is not the ceiling but the choice: he converted most of that uncapped upside into cash and gifts early rather than letting it compound.

Expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder after his first year for hacking the university's computer system; before Apple, he and Jobs built and sold illegal "blue box" phone-phreaking devices. Both are recounted by Wozniak himself in his own retellings.

Before

Both incidents occurred years before Apple's 1976 founding.

Incidental

Formative to the Jobs-Wozniak partnership and to Wozniak's taste for building and selling something together, but not what produced Apple's actual product or its outcome.

Crime

Blue-box sales involved theft of long-distance telephone service.

None

No prosecution or civil action on record for either incident.

Generous, Unassuming, engineer's engineer, allergic to accumulating wealth

Public

The reputation is consistent across insiders, the press, and public accounts, unusually so.

Before

His reputation as the unassuming engineer dates to Apple's earliest years and the Woz Plan stock giveaway, well before any of his later teaching and philanthropy.

Asset

Unlike Jobs's "mixed" reputation as both visionary and difficult, Wozniak's reputation for generosity and lack of interest in money has functioned almost entirely as an asset, in speaking fees, goodwill, and continued relevance, rather than a liability.

The reputation accrued from behaviour rather than being manufactured.

No documented evidence of a deliberate image-shaping effort on the scale of Jobs's authorized biography; his reputation reads as the byproduct of repeated, consistent public statements and choices rather than a managed campaign.

Little documented divergence: early employees who benefited from the Woz Plan, journalists, and the general public describe him consistently as generous and averse to wealth for its own sake.