I'd say if you reject any offer at any price, you don't have principles. You have dogmas.
Let's concoct a toy. You own 100% of a company. A suitor offers to buy it for $100bn. Not negotiable is that they will use 1,000 child laborers post-acquisition.
One could say refusing the $100bn to "save" the thousand from child labor is principled. More compelling, at least for me, is that one turned down the opportunity to go to Mars or rid the world of the guinea worm and possibly other bugs or cure this or that in exchange for feeling good about delaying the hiring of a thousand children.
Both calculi can become dangerous if taken too far. The balance arises in price.
>[by] refusing the $100bn ... one turned down the opportunity to go to Mars or rid the world of the guinea worm and possibly other bugs or cure this or that
The buyer that had the $100bn to spend also had those opportunities but was willing to exchange them for buying your company. So claiming the decision not to sell is somehow reducing e.g. the number of trips to Mars seems disingenuous.
I get where you're coming from, but I think you're ignoring the utilitarian argument that can be made in this kind of situation.
If you'll sell out millions of people who trusted you, and then pat yourself on the back for mailing a check to "help" another group of people you'll never know, then more power to you if that helps you sleep at night.
lmao this is really quite true.
A single person didn't even make this decision. If you were the original creator of WhatsApp, no matter how "honorable" you are, you'll still get Ned Stark'd and everybody else will vote for $19 billion dollars over your silly "duty to the customers."
Welcome to the real world.
Not just them, every single person I know (friends, family, coworkers..) would support my decision. And I have a fairly large social circle. So in that sense, changing one's stance is completely "normal"; whereas refusing 19B just so that "you won't have to serve ads" seems "abnormal".