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Ben Rosen, a longtime chairman of Compaq Computer Corp. and key player when Wall Street went all-in on the personal computer, has died. He was 93.
Rosen passed away on Aug. 23, according to an obituary published by the California Institute of Technology, which counted Rosen as a major donor and chair emeritus of its Board of Trustees. No cause was given.
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A technology analyst, early venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Rosen introduced Apple Computer Inc. to Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street firm that would take it public. He provided early financing to Compaq, Silicon Graphics, Lotus Software and Electronic Arts Inc.
“The timing was fortunate,” Rosen said in a 2019 interview. “I just happened to cross paths with some people who were really important in our lives.”
Rosen was a research analyst at Morgan Stanley in the late 1970s as the firm was looking to expand its clientele beyond the best-known blue-chip companies.
He was, he recalled, “the self-anointed evangelist of personal computers in general and Apple in particular on Wall Street and at Morgan Stanley. I used to take my Apple II on visits to clients, trying to demonstrate that this playful-looking product had a potential far greater than its then perception as a toy for hobbyists and gamesters.”
When Rosen heard that Morgan Stanley was looking to develop new business, he “called us to his office where he had an Apple II,” Jack Wadsworth, a managing director at the time, recalls in a company history. “And he said, ‘Look at this machine and look at what it can do.’”
Not long after, at a small trade show a few blocks away from Morgan Stanley’s Manhattan headquarters, Rosen introduced Robert Baldwin, Morgan Stanley’s expansion-minded president, to Steve Jobs, Apple’s not-yet-famous founder.
Rosen recalled what happened next in a 2011 contribution to HuffPost:
“For the next 20 minutes, the following weird situation took place: Steve engaged in a monologue about how insanely great the Apple PCs were, and simultaneously Bob delivered his own monologue of why Morgan Stanley was the nonpareil banker of the financial world. Neither seemed to listen to, nor care about, what the other was saying. Steve had no clue about investment banking, and Bob’s total knowledge of computers was that Morgan Stanley had some.”
Tech Startups
By the time Morgan Stanley took Apple public in December 1980 at $22 a share, Rosen was onto his next career as a venture capitalist.
He founded Sevin Rosen Partners — later to become Sevin Rosen Funds — in 1981 with L.J. Sevin, who had co-founded Mostek Corp., a semiconductor company, and sold it to United Technologies. Sevin and Rosen initially raised $25 million to support high-tech startups.
Their first fund invested in companies including Compaq, Electronic Arts, Lotus and Silicon Graphics. For the 1982 birth of Compaq, which made some of the first IBM-compatible PCs, Rosen loaned $20,000 to three disgruntled engineers from Texas Instruments Inc. based on their drawing, on a placemat, of a prototype personal computer.
As Compaq chairman from 1982 to 2000, Rosen stepped in at key moments to help prevent the company from joining the list of forgotten computer makers such as Kaypro and Stardent. Compaq became the world’s No. 1 maker of personal computers in the 1990s. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq in 2002.
Later investments by Sevin Rosen included Cypress Semiconductor, Cyrix, Citrix and Ciena. By 2006, when it celebrated its 25th anniversary, the firm had raised more than $1.8 billion and had more than 60 companies in its portfolio.
Dentist’s Son
Benjamin Maurice Rosen was born on March 11, 1933, and raised in New Orleans. His father, Isidore Rosen, was a dentist. His mother was the former Anna Leibof.
He earned electrical engineering degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University.
After a brief career as an engineer with defense contractors Raytheon Corp. and Sperry Gyroscope, he got a master’s degree in business from Columbia University and became the senior electronics analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Rosen was chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2005. Caltech’s Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center was established in 2008 through the couple’s philanthropy.
Rosen said in 2019 that he wanted the building to be renamed for Frances Arnold, the center’s director, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Rosen Motors
That was not the only instance in which Rosen was generous with credit for his and his wife’s philanthropy. Over the course of decades, the couple gave more than $11 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, choosing to name their initiatives after scientists and others they felt deserved recognition.
One Rosen investment that didn’t pay off — but helped put the EV revolution in motion — was the founding in 1993 of Rosen Motors Corp. with his older brother, Harold, a pioneer in the field of geostationary communications satellites.
Their idea was to create a “hybrid-electric” automobile by harnessing the energy produced by a gas-burning turbogenerator with a specially designed flywheel, which would store it like a battery. Wealthy from his Compaq investment, Rosen funded the effort.
Despite what they called a successful road test in January 1997, the brothers were unable to get what they considered an essential next step — a commitment from a major automobile manufacturer. Rosen Motors closed that November.
Rosen called it “an artistic success but a commercial failure.” The company employed a young J.B. Straubel, who went on to help start Tesla Inc.
–With assistance from Marty Schenker.
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