A check Steve Jobs signed way back in 1976 has just gone up for auction and it is already worth 6000 times its original value.
The $4.01 check was originally paid to a Radio Shack on July 23, 1976, when Jobs was just 22 years old. Accounting for inflation, that works out to just over $20 today. The current highest bid is now $25,000, with a potential buyer having to put down $27,500 to top it. The listing ends on December 7, but the 30-minute rule takes place before this, meaning only previous bidders can continue bidding until the end.
Part of what drives this price up is just how important this year was for Steve Jobs. 1976 was the founding year of Apple and the check itself is even ‘from the account of Apple Computer Company’. You can own an original piece of Apple’s history right now for just the price of an iPhone 15 Pro Max, M3 MacBook Pro, Apple Watch Ultra 2, iPad Pro, and a few Vision Pros combined – a steal.
A little more background
In the original listing, RR Auction says that “During this period in the summer of 1976, roughly four months after founding the Apple Computer Company, Jobs and Wozniak were hard at work building their first product."
“Though initially conceived as a kit to be soldered together by the end user—like most enthusiast computers of the era—the Apple-1 became a finished product at the behest of Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world.”
Many Apple products and items have gone up for sale over the last few years, like these four original iPhones reaching almost $200k and this single iPhone selling for $63,000 at auction, but this check is one of the oldest and strangest. It is unsure what exactly that $4.01 got Steve Jobs, but whatever it was, it may well have helped in the invention of Apple’s first products in some small way.
