Apple’s Founding Documents Signed by Steve Jobs Sold for $1.6 Million

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A couple of weeks ago we heard that the original founding documents of Apple Computer, originally signed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne will be put up for auction by Sotheby’s. At that time the auction house estimated that the papers will sell for $100,000 to $150,000, but it looks like they were far off.

According to the official auction page posted on the company’s website, the founding documents of Apple were sold for $1.6 million, or $1,594,000 to be more precise. Fortune reports that the winning bid came via telephone at $1.35 million, not including the buyer’s premium – 12% paid to Sotheby’s. As for the seller, his name is Wade Saadi and he purchased the documents in 1994 from Wayne for just a few thousand dollars.

This is the second time Wayne failed to cash in on his brief experience with Apple. While he was one of the original three founders of the company, Wayne decided to withdraw from the newly formed company after only 11 days, thus giving up his 10% of the company. In today’s money that translates into $36 billion, which Wayne would have been worth had he not retired prematurely from the company. Now he missed out on a once in a lifetime opportunity to sell the founding documents of Apple himself, granted that their value has been significantly bumped up by the recent death of Apple’s iconic leader, Steve Jobs.

Surprisingly though, Sotheby’s has removed the auction’s final price from the site. The auction house never mentioned who won the bid for the original Apple documents, and we could only conclude that the person was quite an Apple fan. However, the buyer has been identified apparently:

According to Bloomberg, the documents went to Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive officer of Cisneros Corp. The Cisneros family, according to a 2006 Forbes listing, is the second wealthiest in South America.

And here’s the video of the last minute of bidding for the papers: