John Sculley III was born on the 6th April 1939, in New York City, USA. He is an investor, businessman and entrepreneur well known for working in the position of CEO in Apple (1983 – 1993), being a partner at Sculley Brothers LLC (1995-2005), co-founding Zeta Interactive (2007 – present) and founding Obi Worldphone (2014 – present). Undoubtedly, all the above mentioned engagements have added huge sums to the total size of John Sculley’s net worth.
How rich is the business mogul? It has been estimated that the outright size of John Sculley’s net worth is as much as $20 million, as of early 2016, accumulated during a career in business now spanning around 60 years.
John Sculley Net Worth $20 Million
To begin with, Sculley was born in USA but the week after his birth he and his family moved to Bermuda; later he lived in Brazil and Europe. At age 14 he invented a cathode ray tube, but could not patent his invention since Sony had filed a similar patent two weeks earlier, which had been called Trinitron tubes. Sculley subsequently graduated from Brown University with a degree in Industrial Design and obtained a Masters in Business Administration from the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
During an interview with Playboy in 1987, Sculley expressed a number of famous predictions, some of which have turned out clearly incorrect, such as the one that the Soviet Union would put a man on Mars within 20 years. However, other forecasts have come true, such as the statement that the optical media (CD-ROM) would revolutionize the personal computer market. Another of his famous predictions concerned the opportunity to navigate a network of knowledge, a prediction materialized with the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Sculley was employed at Pepsi-Cola for 15 years from 1967, rising to be the youngest ever CEO and president in 1977. He then moved on the to Apple, eventually becoming chairman and CEO, but his reign was characterized by a division of the market into many sub-markets, and each sub-market into many segments to cover each with a different model. This vision of the market has produced an explosion of Macintosh models; there were many computer models, but many had almost identical features, and there were different models that had only the name. This marketing strategy has proved unsuccessful, significantly increasing costs without any real benefits, and forced to produce up to four different packages when in fact the computer was always the same, but requiring different advertising that dispersed the forces of marketing and increased costs. More, it created confusion to users who were unable to extricate themselves from the flood of models available; the strategy was clearly losing. In 1993 the board of directors forced Sculley to step down and his place was taken by Michael Spindler initially and later Gilbert Amelio, who has been chosen for its ability to generate profits.
Although his career at Apple was not very successful, John Sculley added huge sums to his net worth while working there. Later, he increased his wealth by investments, while working at Sculley Brother LLC, and founding customer life-cycle marketing company Zeta interactive and a Silicon Valley smartphone manufacturer Obi Worldphone.
Finally, his personal life, John has been married three times and has fathered three children. Currently, he has six grandchildren. In 1960, he married Ruth Sculley: they divorced in 1965. From 1978 to 2011, he was married to Carol Lee Adams. He is now married to Diane Gibbs Poli (2013 – present).