The original contract that established Apple Computer Co. Photo by Sotheby's
The original contract that established Apple Computer Co and signed on 1 April 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, sold for nearly US$1.6m at a Sotheby’s auction in New York yesterday.
Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive of Cisneros Corporation, purchased the three typed partnership agreements Sotheby’s had estimated would sell for between US$100,000 and US$150,000.
Wade Saadi, founder and chief executive of the IT recruitment firm Pencom Systems, was the seller of the documents, which he bought from Wayne in 1994 for “several thousand dollars”.
Five other bidders bid on the contract, in addition to Cisneros, BBC News Online reported.
“(The Apple Computer Co contract) is a foundation document in terms of financial history, social history, and technological history,” Sotheby’s head of books and manuscripts, Richard Austin, had told Bloomberg.
The auction came just more than two months after the death of Apple co-founder and former CEO Jobs. He died on 5 October of respiratory arrest caused by a pancreatic tumour, and the publication of Jobs’ biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson shortly afterwards became a best-seller in little time.
