February 7, 1981: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak gets into a near-fatal plane crash when his single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza goes down during takeoff in California.
With Woz at the controls, the turbocharged, six-seat plane climbed too steeply after leaving Santa Cruz Skypark, a small airport about 25 miles from Cupertino in Scotts Valley. The aircraft stalled and careened through two fences into a nearby skating rink’s parking lot. All four passengers survived — Woz, his fiancée Candi Clark, her brother and her brother’s girlfriend — but Wozniak suffered serious head and facial injuries, including a lost tooth.
Unfortunately, the physical damage turned out to be the least of it.
Steve Wozniak plane crash
The crash came just months after Apple’s IPO, which earned Wozniak a personal fortune of $116 million. He was 30 years old, freshly divorced, newly rich and — as the NTSB later determined — something of an unqualified pilot. Woz had logged only 50 hours of flight time. The agency’s probable cause? "Premature lift-off" combined with "lack of familiarity with aircraft."
Wozniak later suggested Clark might have accidentally leaned on the controls.
The NTSB was far more blunt. Its report also flagged a damning factor: "Miscellaneous — unqualified person operated aircraft." Woz had not been certified to fly a high-performance aircraft as required under federal aviation regulations.
And yet the crash itself barely scratches the surface of this story.
Woz wound up in the hospital suffering from anterograde amnesia — the inability to create new memories — for five weeks straight. He spent much of his recovery time playing video games and convincing his old Homebrew Computer Club friend, Dan Sokol, to smuggle in pizza and milkshakes.
He didn’t immediately go back to Apple.
Rocky Raccoon Clark enrolls at Berkeley
As strange as it seems today, a man worth $116 million and famous enough to make national news responded to his brush with death by… going back to college. Wozniak enrolled at UC Berkeley under the alias "Rocky Raccoon Clark" — Rocky after his dog, Clark after Candi’s last name. The university administration knew who he was.
He just didn’t want computer people treating him like he had all the answers.
"I never dropped out of college," Wozniak told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. "I simply took a year off to earn money for my fourth year of school. And then my career kept going up."
That "year off" lasted about a decade.
And rather than rushing back to Cupertino after recovery, Woz poured roughly $20 million of his own money into staging two massive US Festivals — extravagant rock concerts in San Bernardino County featuring The Police, Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen and David Bowie. The 1982 festival alone cost $8 million to produce and drew over 400,000 fans. He lost money on both.
Don’t get me wrong: Woz did eventually return to Apple. But when he came back a few years later, he stayed for just two more years. He grew frustrated by the lack of attention paid to the Apple II division. And by 1985, he was gone for good.
The co-founder who never really left
Of course, "gone for good" isn’t quite accurate. Viewed from today’s vantage point, Wozniak’s relationship with Apple after 1985 is something of a beautiful oddity. He technically remains an Apple employee to this day — part of the short list of leaders known as Apple Fellows. His weekly paycheck after taxes and savings? About $50.
"I’m still an Apple employee — the only person who’s received a paycheck every week since we started the company," Wozniak said in an interview with Guy Kawasaki. "It’s small, but it’s out of loyalty."
These days, as Apple approaches its 50th anniversary in April 2026 with a market cap hovering around $4 trillion, Woz keeps busy as a speaker and tech commentator. At a Lehigh University talk in January 2026, he called for stricter AI regulation and offered a sharp take: "AI is like a reporter, and the human being has to be the editor."
And that same company he walked away from in 1985 has been taking heat for failing to deliver on its own AI promises — a "more personal Siri" keeps getting pushed back, and rivals like Alphabet have surged ahead.
Woz probably has opinions about that, too. He always does.
Did you know about Woz’s plane crash?
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