When I was in college studying Comp Sci I did a whois on Woz’s domain and sent an email to the registered email (this was generally before the days of free whois protection), not expecting a response, just mentioning how cool his work on the Apple I & II was among others, and how as a CS student was exciting to see where technology had gotten to, asking him what he was up to.
I got a response a day later, thanking me for my email, talking about how he loved hearing from students, telling me about his current dancing with the stars stuff (this was in late 2009), among some other quips and such.
Felt incredibly down to earth and casual, and while I know it only took him maybe 5 minutes to write that email, or maybe it was even copied and pasted, it was super cool to get a response from such a tech icon.
Gaben also does this
Fuckin’ class act.
Wow, some uplifting news which proves there are still some good people on this earth. I needed that, thanks! <3
Here’s a guy that actually tried to make something good, even if the other guy didn’t let him. He worked to live and not lived to work. Yet he still has 10 million and a couple of houses, which definetely doesn’t make him a billionaire, but he has enough to put him in the “fuck you” position
One of the rare birds you kinda got to let slide with his wealth. To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t used that wealth to abuse people.
Yeah maybe he’s like bill gates and gave away large portions of his wealth, to himself…
Stuff like this needs to be thoroughly checked before it becomes “heartwarming”.
Edit: my point: don’t just trust them, verify.
Edit: seems to have angered the bill gates boot lickers lol
Bill Gates’s wealth is listed as about $118 billion. Steve Wozniak says his is “maybe $10 million plus a couple of homes,” so perhaps $20m if they’re very fancy homes. This makes Bill Gates about $117,980,000,000 richer than Steve Wozniak - a completely different category of wealth. I’m sure there are plenty of asshole millionaires but asshole billionaires are immeasurably more dangerous. Woz couldn’t play the Bill Gates kinds games with his money even if he wanted to.
Anyway, I consider myself pretty left, and pretty pro-workers owning the means of production, but I think we should be going after the billionaires first, and not wasting our time on millionaires unless they’re doing something unusually bad.
Sure, but my point was: don’t believe their word for it. Check it up.
Edit: still can’t help yourselves sucking it up to rich people IMO. Guy lived like a billionaire his whole life and now “only” has tens of millions…
Sometimes, the right Steve dies. Eventually. After ruining everything.
And that’s why he’s 75 and happy and Jobs is dead and no one will know his name in 20 years.
Yup, being a CEO is the number one leading cause of pancreatic cancer…
Nope but being an idiot and treating it with a fruit diet is certainly a factor.
😆 that’ll do you in for sure indeed
You’re right. Ignorance got Jobs. Stress doesn’t help though.
Jobs wasn’t ignorant of his situation. He had the best doctors in the world telling him exactly what he needed to do . He decided to ignore them because he thought he was right and they were wrong.
Steve Jobs killed himself. The gun was his hubris and the trigger was the universe telling him no.
And history repeats itself with OceanGate
no one will know his name in 20 years.
I’m not a fan of Jobs but that’s quite a claim. No one will remember one of the most successful CEOs of all time in 2 decades?
Wozniak will leave the public consciousness way sooner than Jobs. Outside of tech circles, pretty much nobody knows who he is now.
Sad, unfair, infuriating, but probably true.
20 years might be pushing it, but he’d be gone 34ish years by that point. He wasn’t much of a philanthropist. Is there any Steve Jobs Parks? Plazas? His early death didn’t lend him much time to create a legacy. He’ll be known in business and tech scenes, sure, but the pop culture knowledge of him will be negligible. Does the general public know about the CEO of IBM 35+ years ago? The current crop of CEOs are like WWE wrestlers in their persona compared to Jobs. Being present for the smartphone revolution was something, but does anyone remember the CEO of the company that introduced the laptop? Jobs wasn’t a Carnegie or Rockefeller.
Idk, Steve Jobs has like at least 2 movies about him. Pretty sure his name will last considerably longer than 20 years on that alone.
People still talk about Jack Welsh’s impact on business culture and he retired in 2001.
No idea who that is
He’s the reason every big company does mass layoffs to boost stock prices every other quarter
All my homies hate Jack Welch. Glad he’s dead.
He was the chair of General Electric for decades. He was one of the most prominent businessmen of the 20th century. People in corporate management still use his techniques and ideas.
Thanks
Oh, definitely as Jobs practically created a personality cult, putting Woz literally behind the curtains.
When ordinary people talk about creative geniuses who make innovative devices that change the course of history, most cases they’ll talk about Jobs, believing he came up with ideas for most if not all the gadgets that makes Apple a known
fashiontech brand… despite Woz being responsible for designing and building the first Apple desktop.Yeah, exactly. The general public thinks that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. He’s not just some random CEO.
The Woz is BOSS!
I saw the Woz at El Burro Restaurant in SJ once and my wife said: Oh it’s the guy from dancing with the stars! 🤦
I had no idea he was on that show. I bet if he heard your wife say that, he would have been super happy.
This reads like a shot at Jobs.
It’s wild the simping done for Gabe on Lemmy. Gamers acting like he’s THEIR billionaire and steam is THEIR corporation and pretending he ain’t evil
He’s significantly less evil than other billionaires and Valve provides a pretty solid service at a fair price. Not very many companies even reach that bar. Giving them credit for that isn’t unreasonable.
All billionaires are bad but I’ll take Gabe over a Bezos or Zuckerberg every day of the week. There’s a huge difference on how those guys see/treat the world.
That’s like saying someone is the nicest serial killer on earth
Edit: it is disheartening seeing so many people on here defending billionaires, we are fucked as a species
Wouldn’t it be nice if serial killers joined a club where they serially kill each other? Just throwing an idea out there, so we don’t need a Luigi club to do the dirt work for them.
Sure.
But there is still “a nicest serial killer” out there.
Dexter as far as serial killers go was pretty nice compared to the average serial killer. He brought donuts and glides like a lizard on ice.
I’d rather be murdered by the nicest serial killer than any of the others.
Logic dictates that he’d use a ‘nice’ way to do it, such as laughing gas, or something.
Over slowly skinning me alive and dunking me in a salt bath.
That’s like saying someone is the nicest serial killer on earth
Yeah that’s a fair statement someone could make. You wanna get killed by the serial killer that just poisons you in your sleep or you wanna get killed by the one that removes your skin and dismembers you alive? See the difference?
it is disheartening seeing so many people on here defending billionaires, we are fucked as a species
Literally no one is doing that here (“ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE BAD”) Saying one thing isn’t as bad as the other isn’t a defense of the former.
I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns.
Words to live by.
This is why all of the megarich are selfish assholes.
The good people give their money away.
Or they have an epiphany and realize they have, perhaps not ‘fuck you’ money, but at least ‘bite me’ money. Then they sit in a row boat and fish or something. Greed is a pathology and we do a favor to those inflicted with it by taking it away faster and faster the more they steal from us.
Part of what I liked about Rowling was that she was the first billionaire to lose billionaire status due to donating so much to charity. She had been poor & alone and understood how to support that.
Then she decided fucking over transfolk was her favorite nonprofit.
She’s a clown and a transphobe for sure.
And the good people never brag how charitable they are for doing so.
The good people don’t become billionaires in the first place
You have extra money to name a hospital wing after yourself? Should have been taxed appropriately in the first place so that the hospital didnt need to sell naming rights just to fill a funding gap…
You have extra money to donate to your family charity? Should have been paid as appropriate wages to your workers instead of accumulating in your personal net worth…
All billionaire philanthropy is a failure of policy that allowed them to unjustly accumulate those billions through exploting others, thereby creating most of the problems that they “solve” through their philanthropy later in life
I had an Apple IIgs back in the day “signed” (printed) by Woz. I’m glad that dude is still living his best life.
This one wasn’t signed, but I have fond memories playing “Thexder” on an Apple IIgs in my grandparent’s basement growing up. You can guess where my username came from.
That game sure was hard to play with all 4 arrow keys in a line on that keyboard…
There is a Thexder game for the PS3 & PSP, if that interests you.
I did hear about the remake/remaster. I’ve never actually played it though. Maybe I should find it on an emulator. The remastered music is definitely nostalgic
It was him, not Steve Jobs, who deserved to be Apple’s guiding light.
But could he curl his goatee like jobs? I think not!
Steve Wozniak’s net worth is not definitively known, but it is estimated to be around $100 million. He continues to receive a stipend from Apple for his role as an employee emeritus. In 2006, this stipend was estimated to be $120,000 per year
“I gave all my wealth away”…
Steve Wozniak’s net worth is not definitively known,
They literally TOLD YOU THEY DON’T KNOW and you’re still listening to their estimates as if they’re fact.
but it is estimated to be around $100 million.
estimated BY WHO? AND HOW?
Business insider mentions the yearly $120000.
Market realist estimates it to be 100 mil net worth, but is substantially smaller that it once was, at an estimate of 10bil.
Listen - the point is not what he is worth. The point is that even though he has given away all his apple wealth, he is still a very rich man, who can afford to have this point of view.
I think that’s his point. Past a certain level wealth makes no difference to your quality of life. So give it away, make the world better, and still have enough for more than 1 lifetime rather than horde and continue to amass like a cancer.
Yeah. For me though, sayingig that you dont live for wealth and power, when you have enough to live 2 lifetimes comfortably, is kind of ironic.
The 120M aside, which is almost certainly pulled out of someone’s ass, $120k/yr isn’t that much. I’m sure that almost ever engineer at Apple makes more than that.
120k in silion valley in particular is barely a livable wage. CoL is incredibly high there.
He probably owns his property already, so that’s a huge chunk, but the point still stands.
That’s likely the case for people who are renting and having to take out enormous mortgages so is draining all their income.
But, for someone who got a home fully paid from decades back, so all they have is general expenses they would be comfortable. Which is the case for anywhere even if things are more expensive then other places.
Like, he’s not going to be starving, but it’s not exactly megayacht level either.
I would hope all their engineers make more than that. For Apple that should be entry level.
The full quote:
I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.
Smiles minus frowns.
This right here is the ultimate KPI, yet I’ve never seen it in a dashboard or spreadsheet. Woz is a legend…
