Steve Wozniak

Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak was born in San Jose, California, in 1950, and studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. As a teenager he was a gifted, mischievous engineer — he and a young Steve Jobs famously built "blue boxes" to explore the phone system, an episode Jobs later credited as the seed of their partnership: "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple."

In 1976, working largely alone, Wozniak designed and hand-built the Apple I — circuitry, board, and software. That spring he co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne. A year later he delivered the Apple II (1977), with color graphics and built-in BASIC — one of the first mass-market personal computers and the machine that carried computing beyond hobbyists into homes and schools. When Apple went public in 1980, Wozniak became wealthy overnight — and promptly ran the "Woz Plan," giving his own shares to early employees who'd been left out. In 1985 he and Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan, and Woz stepped back from day-to-day Apple.

In the decades since, he has never stopped building and teaching. He created the first programmable universal remote, founded the GPS venture Wheels of Zeus, served as chief scientist at Fusion-io and Primary Data, co-founded Silicon Valley Comic Con, launched the EdTech platform Woz U (2017), and — most recently — co-founded Privateer Space (2021) to tackle orbital debris, with its Pono spacecraft reaching operational hardware in 2025. Along the way he taught computer classes to schoolchildren for years and helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

He is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2000), a Heinz Award and Hoover Medal recipient, and the New York Times bestselling author of iWoz (2006). Perhaps most telling: the man who once owned nearly 8% of what is now a multi-trillion-dollar company has said he has "no idea how much I have" and that he gave his Apple wealth away because "wealth and power are not what I live for."