Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I hope his parents are already loaded, otherwise they have done a VERY poor job of guiding him down the appropriate path. At $30 million you can live a VERY comfortable life unless you're a complete idiot with it.

I get "chasing your dream" - but I struggle to believe an idea he came up with for a school science fair at the age of 14 was any kind of lifelong dream.

View on HN

He may not have had a concept of what $30 million really is. I know I don’t, even at my age.

If he has his needs met, what does it mean to him to have his needs met more? I know logically this can be worked out that lots of money buys lots of comfort, but thinking back at that age, I personally didn’t know squat about the value of a dollar. I grew up with less money than most of my peers (not “food insecure poor”, but “all I got for Christmas was cloths and 1 small toy poor”) but never thought about it. I just thought my parents were careful spenders.

However, to your point; where were the adults in the equation?

>He may not have had a concept of what $30 million really is. I know I don’t, even at my age.

I would be shocked if he had any concept at all. Most adults have no concept of what it means to have that kind of money which is why most lottery winners are broke within 5 years of winning the lottery. You literally can live an upper middle-class/lower upper-class lifestyle without working another day in your life off that interest alone.

Point taken, and I'm not trying to pick apart your post with pedantry, just curious how the numbers come out. 2% gives you 600K/year. If you go with the retirement fund concept of spending "only" 4%/year, that's 1.2M/year. I don't know how you're defining "upper middle-class", but I'll bet most would define it much lower than that.

Finally, a money market fund at 0.5% has an annual yield pretty close to what I make working 40 hours/week. And in my opinion, we live pretty well on what I make in an expensive city like Seattle.

All that, of course, assumes that one does not lapse into lottery winner syndrome because one doesn't have a concept of how much money $30 million is, therefore views it as a bottomless pit of cash, and blows it all on velvet Elvis paintings, bad business ideas from your cousin, and "helping" out your meth-head sister.

All of that assuming assumes the $30 million dollar offer is real. And I'm convinced a vending machine idea is worth a couple of orders of magnitude less than what is claimed.

Perhaps it's not purely about the money to him. If he's spending every minute outside of school working on this business, there's a great chance that he just likes the work and doesn't want to have to find something new to work on.

Then take the $30million and make sure there's a job for you in the new company. Maybe it's not that easy, but it seems like there could be options like that.

Maybe they let him decide for himself how he wanted to approach it?

He's 14. Your job as a parent is to guide your child into adulthood. If you let a child make a life changing decision like accepting $30 million without a backup plan at the age of 14, you're failing as a parent.

I don't know. There are three ways this could go:

Life proceeds normally

The child learns a lot from the experience of raising money for this invention, along the way gathering all sorts of experiences that are valuable in the working world.

The child (Well, parents until $age-of-majority) get 30$m with which to improve the child's life.

Either of the secondary options are useful. You're viewing the value of money and survival as the primary goal. The child could already be set for life with that depending on the earning of the parents and their pensions, etc. Either of the two latter options provide unknown gains and losses to the child, depending on what you value more.

Note that this excludes negotiating a better bid with another company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com