A job application filled out by the late Apple boss Steve Jobs in 1973 has auctioned for $343,000.
It’s the highest amount that the artifact has fetched at any of the four auctions it’s been involved in, comfortably beating the previous record of $222,400 bid by a group of friends going by the name Winthorpe Ventures at a sale in March.
The latest auction took place online and closed on Wednesday, July 28.
Jobs filled out the one-page application by hand when he was 18 years old, three years before he co-founded Apple with friend Steve Wozniak and tech businessman Ronald Wayne.
The position that he was seeking isn’t shown on the form, but considering what he went on to do, and the fact that the application lists “electronics tech” and “design engineer” as special abilities and interests, along with “computer” and “calculator” for experience, we can safely assume it was tech-related.
“The Steve Jobs Job Application from 1973 is a unique piece of history from the exact moment that a dreamer changed the world,” the blurb on the auction page says.
“It’s a snapshot into the mind of a future genius at a moment where any small deviation from the path ahead would have meant a very different world today.”
Jobs’ application has gone under the hammer three other times, selling for $18,750 in 2017, $174,757 in 2018, and $222,400 in March.
In an effort to generate more interest in the latest auction, and as a clever way to generate an even bigger payday, Winthorpe Ventures offered the artifact as not only a physical copy but also as an NFT, a kind of certificate that allows a person to take ownership of something digital.
The organizer said it decided to offer the document in two formats in two separate auctions “to test the appetite for digital assets in contrast with physical equivalents.”
In the end, the NFT version of Jobs’ application form fetched just $23,076 — way less than the physical version — apparently confirming that most bidders were fixed on getting their hands on the original, physical artifact.
NFTs have garnered a lot of attention over the past year, leading to some big-money sales for digital artists and others keen to get involved. Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, for example, recently sold an NFT representing his first tweet for around $2.5 million.
The identities of the auction winners haven’t yet been revealed.
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