I can only ask "Why?"<p>It's the buyer's call of course but generally things that have no obvious utilitarian value are bought for either of two reasons: future value (expected rise in value or expected keep of current value) or emotional reasons (such as belongings of close, personally meaningful people or beautiful items).<p>It's hard to imagine vibrant aftermarkets for these founding papers so it must be a combination of feeling closely connected to Apple's founders and huge amounts of money: enough for a million to become peanuts.<p>Still the money alone wouldn't explain it: I probably could pay one 1/1000th of my annual income (that'd be one million if I earned a billion each year) for those papers but I wouldn't because I can't think of a reason why.