I can try to imagine how someone might feel to have passed on the opportunity to invest. Yes, money is not everything in life... But missing on a billion dollar might not be easy to process for most of us.
Occasionally I wonder what I'd have done with all that money, but very rarely. I don't miss the billions. The $1M (plus or minus) that I got out of it was more than enough to count myself deeply fortunate. Nobody "earns" that much money - I just got lucky.
I prefer the path I took - a great life, much happiness, low stress, and for the last 20 years, the fun and games of building one of the most successful libre software projects around.
OTOH, I did tell Jeff that I was having a daughter in several months and planned to go to a 3 day week after that happened. He agreed to that ("I knew when I met you that you'd think about work 24/7 anyway"), so there was a tradeoff there.
I'm not really complaining, but when I did find out what some other early hires had negotiated, it stuck in my throat for a bit.
A friend invested much of his savings equally in ~5 promising Seattle-area businesses in the early 2000s. Four went to zero, one was AMZN. Had he chosen only slightly differently, five might have gone to zero.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/2/17927916/the-witcher-autho...
Do you think he would have returned the lump sum if the game failed and they went broke?
You give up risk when you ask for a lump sum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
"In the early 1990s, Wayne sold the original Apple partnership contract paper, signed in 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak, and himself, for US$500. In 2011, the contract was sold at auction for $1.6 million.[15] Wayne has stated that he regrets that sale.[5][6][16]"
One trait successful investors share is that they don’t cry over missed opportunities.
Lots of people on HN could quality as accredited investors just from having being a part of a double income couple, getting paid tech worker salaries.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
To be an accredited investor, a person must have an annual income exceeding $200,000, or $300,000 for joint income, for the last two years with expectation of earning the same or higher income in the current year. An individual must have earned income above the thresholds either alone or with a spouse over the last two years. The income test cannot be satisfied by showing one year of an individual's income and the next two years of joint income with a spouse. The exception to this rule is when a person is married within the period of conducting a test.
A person is also considered an accredited investor if they have net worth exceeding $1 million, either individually or jointly with his spouse. The SEC also considers a person to be an accredited investor if they are a general partner, executive officer, director or a related combination thereof for the issuer of unregistered securities.
Crap, maybe Kodak does have a future.