Apple Founding Contract Signed by Jobs Could Fetch $150,000 at Sotheby's
On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs got together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to draft a three- page contract that established Apple Computer Co. — Next month, the contract, with the three founding partners' signatures, hits the auction block in New York.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's founding paperwork is entering the same auction lane its earliest hardware already occupies: in November 2010 a working Apple-1 computer sold for $160,000, establishing a price floor for the company's origin-era artifacts. Now Sotheby's is offering the document layer — the three-page contract signed on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne that established Apple Computer Co., with a $150,000 estimate.
The seller side of the story is thin by design: the contract carries all three founders' signatures, and Wayne — the least documented of the trio, given how briefly he was a partner — is what makes the document complete rather than merely old. Wozniak's own retelling of Apple's earliest days has kept founder-era material in circulation as a collector category.
First-order effects
- Sotheby's gets a live test of whether a signed founding document commands hardware-level prices — the $150,000 estimate sits just under what the Apple-1 realized in 2010.
- Whoever buys it acquires the only complete set of all three founders' signatures on Apple's incorporation contract, a provenance asset no later Apple document can replicate.
Second-order effects
- A strong result would push other holders of early Apple and Silicon Valley ephemera toward consignment, tightening supply expectations ahead of future auctions.
- Auction houses beyond Sotheby's gain a comparable data point for pricing pre-commercial computing documents, which until now have traded far below vintage hardware benchmarks.
Third-order effects
- If paper artifacts keep clearing near hardware prices, computing history consolidates into a recognized alternative-asset class — founded-company contracts treated the way rare manuscripts are, with estimates set by scarcity of signatures rather than function.
The trend: Early Apple artifacts are maturing from curiosities into a benchmarked collectibles market, where founding documents now compete with vintage machines on price.