whatilearned
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell
TIL in the 1970s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak offered a 1/3 stake in Apple for $50,000 to Nolan Bushnell, their former boss and founder of Atari. He said no, but later spent $500,000 on the rights to the Pizza Time Theater chain. He said “It’s kind of fun to think about, when I’m not crying.”
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Bushnell established Pizza Time Theater while working at Atari as a means to leverage Atari’s arcade games. The fact that after he left Atari he turned it into Chuck E. Cheese (formerly Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater) seems to have been posted a lot about TIL but not the part about turning down the opportunity to be an early owner of Apple.
Apple’s current market cap is around $2.8 trillion dollars with shareholder equity of $63 billion. Even if we use the lower number, a third of that (had he held on to it) would be 420,000% return on investment over 45 years, or almost 1000% per year.
Least he’s honest about it. One guy sold a third of Apple for almost nothing. Acted like he was still cool.
Don’t feel too bad for Mr. Bushnell, he has a net worth of more than 50 million USD. Sure, he could have been a billionaire, but 50 million USD is a pretty nice place to end up in life.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a bio pic on Bushnell dude had a pretty fascinating life