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Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell turned down his former employee, the late Steve Jobs, when he was offered to buy a third of Apple for $50,000 in the 1970s. With the iPhone titan now standing at $3.1 trillion, the video gaming pioneer missed out on making $1 trillion from his relatively small investment. But he isn’t troubling himself with regret, reasoning he might not be as happy—and Apple may not have been as successful—if he accepted the deal.
Many people may be kicking themselves for not buying Bitcoin or investing in Nvidia stock sooner—but few will have missed out on a bigger deal than Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell, the first Silicon Valley boss of the late Steve Jobs.
A young Jobs offered the gaming mogul an eye-popping deal: buy a third of Apple for just $50,000. What might come as a shock to many is that Bushnell turned it down.
Apple has since grown into a $3.1 billion sensation with over a billion iPhones sitting in people’s back pockets, and over 100 million Mac users worldwide—and if Bushnell had taken the deal, his cut would have made him $1 trillion today.
Bushnell first witnessed Jobs’ potential as a businessman in the 1970s, when the college dropout joined Atari as a technician and games designer before moving into entrepreneurship.
Jobs was an essential engineer “solving problems in the field” at Atari, Bushnell recalled, but his leadership mentality also meant some tension at the office. The Atari cofounder strategically employed Jobs during nightshifts, knowing that Wozniak would also join and help out on projects like the brick-breaking game “Breakout.” But Jobs would also barge into his office to tell Bushnell that the other employees weren’t good at soldering, offering to instruct them. Bushnell recognized that Jobs was a genius—albiet, a complicated one.
“He was a difficult person,” Bushnell told ABC News in 2015. “He was very smart. Often he was the smartest person in the room, and he would tell everybody that. It’s generally not a good social dynamic.”
But years later, the tech pioneer isn’t quietly simmering over his choice to reject the offer.
“I could have owned a third of Apple computer for $50,000, and I turned it down,” Bushnell said in the interview. “I’ve got a wonderful family, I’ve got a great wife, my life is wonderful. I’m not sure that if I had been uber, uber, uber rich that I’d have had all of that.”
In fact, Bushnell even thinks Apple may not have been so successful if he had taken the deal. And his potential payout may not have soared to that trillion-dollar height.
