You know what’s cool? Turning down twenty billion dollars

You can't take the ink out of the water, once it's in. When you sell your autonomy over a product whose properties give your life meaning, you pour the ink. Even more painful if that product then turns around and comes to represent values opposite yours.

Short of a buyback, which in this case is off the table, there's no sum that rectifies the regret of lost opportunity and the turning of the thing you built against you.

It's a hair callous DHH to be so direct about it, but as an observation, it seems sound – Acton appears to be a distraught billionaire when he might have been a sound-sleeping millionaire.

Perhaps that's not a trade worth making.