- $100’000 seems like a rather generous compensation to change your email address.
- And most importantly, they simply agreed to his initial demand. And now he’s backing off out of greed. Hell they even agreed to his second counter-offer of $100k and now he wants $200k…
The point here is:
- someone with knowledge of something’s value tried to by something - person who owned it realized that they didn’t know the value - person realized the value and decided he wasn’t going to undercut himself.
Now in this situation, you’re calling the 79 year old man greedy, rather than the company being greedy? The company that is fairly-clearly trying to run an old man over with legal fees to steal something that they don’t own?
He said it as a clear joke. Here's a ridiculously huge number for a novelty, a bauble - now go away.
If you come up to me while I riding my bike and says "I'll give you 25 dollars for that" and I respond "it's price is 500 dollars firm", that doesn't mean you can then give me 500 dollars and take my bike or sue me for refusing. That is ridiculous.
Even if I did have an intention of selling the bike at that price, I am in the middle of using it and can easily accept or reject attempts to buy it at a time that is inconvenient for me. Similarly, it is also my right to choose who buys my bike at that price. If it has strong emotional value I may refuse to sell it to someone who I don't think will treat it well.
Nobody is forced to sell their house to a particular buyer because that buyer emailed back with "accept" in response to an inquiry about the price.
1) Parent post never accepted an offer to sell their house to you.
2) $50k is not ample compensation for any house almost anywhere, as shown by median housing prices.
Neither did the old man. So, case closed?
If I say "it's worth about twice that", are you now allowed to evict me? I think not.
There’s no world where Jump should be suing this person. There’s no contract here. Jump is just being greedy and is trying to bully this person into selling the domain.
If you don’t want to sell, they say “this domain is not for sale”. If you say the price is a “firm $50k”, well, it looks to me like you’re willing to sell for $50k. And I don’t think he was bullied into coming up with this offer.
You can change the price of something based on the buyer’s response. Happens all the time.
Magic the Gathering, antiques, art, domains, Instagram usernames, etc. if someone starts salivating at a price you thought was wild, you’re obviously selling for too low.
He's not obligated to sell it for any amount of money, and he's definitely not done anything that he should be sued over.
He's free to be as greedy as he wants to be, and the company are free to either pay up or go away. But bringing him to court because "wahhh he won't sell to us" does seem ridiculous.
Order is of the essence here.
They offered initially $ 2,500.
Then he replied saying that the price was $50,000.
Then he rejected the offer of $ 50,000 and was offered first $ 100,000 and then (through a different agent) $ 200,000.
Of course IANAL (and know anyway very little of US Laws) but if this corporation really-really believed that the $50,000 reply actually amounted to a binding contract, they should have attempted to have it respected immediately, the two later offers, doubled each time, sound nothing like "good faith" (probably irrelevant in court, still ...).
I think they were willing to pay more than initially agreed to expedite the process. Since it didn’t work I’m pretty sure they’ll ask the court to execute the sale at $50k.
At least when/where the object of the sale has a value that can objectively be estimated.
Surely a reply like "The domain is not for sale." would have been better, but considering a one line reply (to an unknown/unverified correspondent) a binding contract sounds (to me) more than a bit "off".
You can’t reject your own offer!
Maybe it is a translation issue, here (Italy) it is the buyer that makes an offer and the seller that sets a price or accepts an offer (or proposes a counter-offer).
However even if this was his long con on owning the domain having proposed a number in email seems unlikely to form a contract that he must sell it to them at that cost but I suppose we'll see.
Not getting a current market value offer an blindly accepting isn't greed. Being 79 with a domain you carried for years can be worth more than 100,000 which after taxes is much less.
What do you think motivates the algorithmic trading company trying to buy the domain?
I guess actually everyone is greedy in this story, but only one party doesn’t seem to be true to their word.
Tech companies: we exist to make the world a better place
Everyone on this planet is greedy.
- The church priest asking for donations
- the homeless man asking for drug money
- and the software engineer with competing FANG offers.
At least finance people have the balls to admit it.