Steve Wozniak Says He Cofounded Apple After HP Rejected Him Five Times — and It Was Never About Money

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Stella Artois

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says the company that would go on to become one of the most valuable in the world was never meant to be a path to wealth. It only existed, he says, because Hewlett-Packard turned down his personal computer idea five separate times.

Wozniak had landed a job at HP after stepping away from his degree at UC Berkeley, hoping to build his career there. He pitched the company on his personal computer concept repeatedly throughout the 1970s, and was rejected every time, gradually warming to co-founder Steve Jobs’s suggestion that the two of them simply build it themselves.

In a commencement address at Grand Valley State University earlier this year, Wozniak was blunt about what actually drove him. “When you try things, they don’t have to be for obvious money,” he told graduates, adding of Apple’s founding: “Did I want to make money? Start a company? Start an industry? No.”

What he actually wanted, he said, was recognition from people who understood the work. “I wanted other engineers or other computer people to look at my designs and say, ‘Whoa’ and appreciate me and my brilliance,” Wozniak said, describing a motivation rooted in craft and peer respect rather than financial ambition.

That philosophy followed him well past Apple’s early, scrappy years. Though he stepped back from day-to-day involvement with the company in 1985, Wozniak stayed nominally on Apple’s payroll for years afterward, and said in a 2020 podcast appearance that after taxes and savings, his weekly paycheck during that stretch amounted to roughly $50. He later described deliberately distancing himself from Apple’s growing wealth, saying “I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values.” Through the 1980s, he gradually sold off much of his Apple stock, giving shares to early employees who’d missed out on equity the first time around and donating substantial sums to charity.

His advice to today’s graduates balances that idealism with practicality: first, secure the basics, “enough money for an apartment,” he said, and only after that’s covered, go chase what actually matters to you rather than defaulting to whatever path looks safest or most lucrative on paper.