Did you get offered 1% of Apple? I mean, getting offered equity at the start of a thing is what I was trying to talk about.
I think your choice was perfectly reasonable and was not a mistake at all.
Knowing which will succeed and which will fail is sort of the whole caveat. You can't know the future when you make these decisions.
I think it's great to learn from your previous decisions but this one seems (1) emotionally dangerous, (2) logically faulty and (3) largely selected for the headline.
If Apple had gone bust there would have been nothing to write about. By the same measure I can review my life and take every decision I took with hindsight and re-calculate what my net worth would be if I had taken the other fork, I'm pretty sure I could come up with a few hundred million as well but that doesn't matter, you only get one life.
Next time you have to make a decision like that: take the other fork in the road, and likely you'll still end up frustrated because of the road not taken.
Life is a series of 'and' ports, if you miss one it will look like that was the one that did it but in the end random chance had as much to do with it as that one decision did.
So the comparison with a lottery ticket is on the money. Besides all that I think you ended up quite well so 'cost' is probably not the best term anyway.
From Garry's blog [0], it looks the it was more than just buying a lottery ticket. Peter Thiel cut him a great deal, by all accounts, and he still let it go. The equivalent to that, imo, would be to have refused ticket offered to you for free which then won the lottery.
[0] (Peter Thiel said) "Cash this check, quit your job. This is a zero risk opportunity for you." I said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to Level 60 next year."