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How a Business Mogul Rejected Steve Jobs and Apple’s Billions for His Undying Love of Pizza

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The notion that hindsight is 20/20 is perhaps nowhere more true than in business. Just ask entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, who in the 1970s turned down an opportunity to help an enterprising Steve Jobs to launch Apple. As the pioneer of early video game sensation Atari, which introduced its household video game console when chips were cheap, Bushnell was the Apple co-founder’s inspiration. Therefore, it stands to reason that Jobs would have turned to Bushnell, who at the time was building Atari’s latest console while Chuck E. Cheese was a glimmer in his eye, for funding. 
 
In the mid-1970s, Jobs asked his former Atari boss, the godfather of video games, for a $50,000 capital injection to help get his tech startup off the ground. In exchange, Jobs offered his mentor 33% of his company, then called Apple Computer, in a display of how much he valued his contribution. If Bushnell had accepted, that stake would have been worth a fortune that would make Bushnell one of the wealthiest humans on the planet. But fate had other plans.
 
Bushnell decided to decline his prodigy’s offer, instead choosing to focus his energy on building his next empire – Chuck E. Cheese family restaurants. Besides, as Bushnell told ABC, Jobs wasn’t an easy person to work with, which is why as a young engineer he was put on the night shift. Perhaps Bushnell, who once told Jobs “democracy in a company creates mediocrity,” feared the two personalities would have clashed. Little did he know back then that Jobs, who created Atari’s single-player video game Pong, was destined to change the course of history with the introduction of the Mac and iPhone while Apple would one day be valued at multiple trillions of dollars.  
 
Bushnell, who has an estimated net worth of $50 million, later admitted “he’s done some really stupid things.” But he has also managed to keep a proper perspective, saying: “I’ve got a wonderful family, I’ve got a great wife, my life is wonderful. I’m not sure that if I had been uber, uber, uber-rich that I’d have had all of that.” Incidentally, Bushnell also had beer taps installed at all of his companies.
 
While Bushnell has had to live with his decision to decline a stake in Apple, that choice appears to have ignited a chain of events in his businesses that have caused him regrets and kept his legacy from reaching its full potential.
 

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