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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/28/apples_founding_contract_up_for_auction/

Apple's founding contract to fetch up to $150,000

Sotheby's auctions off the ultimate fanboi holiday gift

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Business, 28th November 2011 19:35 GMT

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Apple's founding contract is going on the auction block at Sotheby's in New York and is expected to fetch between $100,000 and $150,000.

"With everything in the news, this seems to be the time to do it," the auction house's books and manuscripts chief Richard Austin told Bloomberg [1].

The three-page contract [2] was signed by The Two Steves™ – Jobs and Wozniak – along with lost-to-history cofounder Ronald Wayne [3] on April Fools' Day 1976. Included in the lot – number 241, should you be interested in placing a bid – is the Statement of Withdrawal signed on April 12, which Wayne signed relinquishing his 10 per cent ownership.

For that princely sum, however, you'd receive somewhat damaged goods: Sotheby's notes that documents come with "small staple holes and crease in upper left corners."

Apple's original founding contract

A mere $100,000 to $150,000, and the ultimate fanboi holiday gift can be yours

"This is a foundation document in terms of financial history, social history and technological history," said Austin, presumably in support of the lot's high expected price – exceeded only by a signed letter [4] from George Washington, estimated to be worth $300,000 to $500,000, and a notebook [5] of famed Bengali author and composer Rabindranath Tagore, estimated at $150,000 to $250,000.

Wozniak, Jobs, and Wayne's signatures on Apple's founding contract

Ronald who?

Had Wayne kept his original 10 per cent stake in Apple, Job's biographer Walter Isaacson estimates, at the end of 2010 he would have been worth $2.6 billion – more than enough to snap up all 353 lots in Sotheby's December 13 auction. ®