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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

Are there really people who would turn down a hundred million dollars for a chance at a larger potential payout in 5-10 years? Are these people even members of Homo sapiens?

A $100MM bonus seems like a career-ending bonus to me. How do you keep going to work after that?

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> Are there really people who would turn down a hundred million dollars for a chance at a larger potential payout in 5-10 years?

Sure, and the numbers get far larger than $100 million.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin for example, turned down very large acquisition offers, including for at least a billion dollars from Yahoo, at a time when they didn't even have a serious business model.

Mark Zuckerberg turned down several large offers for Facebook when it didn't have a serious functional business. He could have walked away nearly a billionaire before Facebook had even printed a dollar of profit.

Bill Gates turned away numerous, large acquisition offers in the first ~10 years of Microsoft's existence. IBM was interested in buying them for years.

The Snapchat owners turned down ~$3 billion from Google to go public instead as an exit. Even after the beating their stock has taken in the last few months, the market cap of Snap is $15 billion today.

> The Snapchat owners turned down ~$3 billion from Google

from Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg turned down an offer from Yahoo. Evan Spiegel, from FB.
Plenty of CEOs have career ending incomes / bonuses already.

Yes, but they turned it down to work on what they liked. This is just paying you upfront to do that. Granted you don't own it...

The difference is at that point Mark had something worth that much money and had already spent several years building it. If he decided in 1 year he was done he could have probably found another buyer at a valuation high enough to retire unless he royally screwed up the company.
Turning down $100mm when you have nothing of value yet is very different imo

I'm not positive, but I think Spiegel already made FU money as part of a funding round prior to the FB offer.
Can anyone confirm?

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