Well, he did say the truth about getting paid by Atari, and gave him "his half", which Woz regarded as "good enough compensation", otherwise he wouldn't have considered working with him in the future. It's kind of the same game played when a middle manager that brings no value to the company gets paid 3x the engineers salary, or when the CEO gets the golden parachute while the shareholders are loosing money and the employees are getting salary cuts or the company is getting downsized... but you don't go around calling people "liars" for playing this game as the corporate level, do you? Yeah, it's no longer "lying" because the information is theoretically available to all players, or at least to the IRS, but it's kind of the same game.
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship
I think also too a lot of people don't realize when they parrot out this story is that Jobs and Apple never abandoned Woz, Woz just chose at some point not to work there anymore and move on with his life. On his Wikipedia page it states that even though he no longer works there, he's still on the books as an employee and receives a stipend from Apple estimated at $120K.
I'm not sure how those two conclusions can be gleaned from this story.
It is pretty safe to assume that Steve Wozniak was not pulling the same types of shenanigans. And, it's really too bad if the story serves to normalize such behavior.
Second, it isn't a story about managers providing no value compared to less well paid engineers, it is a brilliant engineer letting something despicable pass because his partner brought so many non engineering assets to the table.
I think people should flee any company where there are dishonest managers who provide no value. It isn't uncommon to see companies that start out with comparable products, design and engineering talent diverge because one has a terrible management team.
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship