On his 75th birthday, Apple legend Steve Wozniak pops up in a comment thread about his 'bad decision' to sell his stock in the '80s with a devastatingly zen reply: 'I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for'

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You gotta love the Woz.

Steve Wozniak gives a double thumbs up
(Image credit: Getty Images - Steve Jennings / Contributor)

If Steve Wozniak had "only" designed the Apple II, one of the foundational computers of the early PC era, he'd still be a computing legend. But after leaving Apple in the mid-'80s Wozniak went on to help establish the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sponsored the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, and has spent the last four decades on philanthropy, public speaking and founding a truly wild range of tech companies, like one focused on minimizing orbital debris.

What makes him one of the all-time greats though, at least in my mind, is that despite decades in the tech business and access to fabulous wealth he by all accounts seems to have remained an almost absurdly chill and normal guy.

Wozniak has millions of dollars to his name, but clearly chose to walk a different path than his contemporary tech billionaires like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison who accrued billions. And he remains the kind of everyman, old school tech nerd who occasionally reads—and even comments on—Slashdot. A few days ago (on his 75th birthday, no less), Woz popped into a thread about his ongoing lawsuit against YouTube over internet scammers who'd used his likeness, though not to address the topic of the lawsuit.

Then Woz popped up to reply, as noticed by Bluesky poster Caræsten. And it's definitely him—Wozniak used the same account for a Slashdot Q&A way back in 2012.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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