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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s selection bias, because plenty of folks do cash out early.

If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B, neither you nor I would be talking about Facebook or Zuck at all right now.

The only people that get to these insane levels of wealth are people who repeatedly let their bets ride, perhaps due to innately low risk aversion.

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I think about Tom from myspace all the time. He's not a billionaire, but he cashed out for tens of millions and is living the best life.

I don’t think about him all the time but it’s wisdom! Some people just seem to intuitively be better at understanding the mechanisms of the hedonist treadmill than others. I’d claim that all the tech billionaires we know of must be rather bad at it. Otherwise they had followed Tom’s example.

MySpace Tom is on Twitter btw, https://twitter.com/myspacetom

He also had this zinger of a conversation on Twitter (quite relevant to the thread) a few years back: https://imgur.com/hLV4k :D

If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B, neither you nor I would be talking about Facebook or Zuck at all right now.

I think that's kind of the point – I can't imagine myself being offered the choice of "enough money to do whatever you want forever" or "enough money to do whatever you want forever but also constant public attention" and choosing the latter.

Yahoo cofounders themselves walk around today with enough money forever and without public attention.

The US government would not allow the sale of LifeLog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

Forget innately low risk aversion, Sam has autistically low levels of risk aversion:

https://twitter.com/sammykoppelman/status/159047684524111462...

That's not autism at work, whether he is autistic or not.

If anything, this study would predict greater risk aversion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29846850/#:~:text=This%20stu....

if 330M people flip a coin 20 times in a row, someone will get close to 20 heads. that person might have been zuck. how much is talent and how much is luck, no one will even know.

There is something that we do know though. Those who dont flip coin at all will never get close to 20 heads. Ever.

Why would I even want to flip a coin? I already have a bag full of pennies.

If you have an account in HN, something tells me you have flipped some coins.

And I lost every time.

Keep flipping! you will eventually regress back to the mean.

I rather focus on studying languages and instruments. Sacrificed too much time chasing money. Don't have the brain for it.

>if 330M people flip a coin 20 times in a row, someone will get close to 20 heads.

And then they will go on CNBC and talk about the journey that got them to where they are today.

always.

> someone

About 314 people to be precise.

29 times then

> If Zuck had taken Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for $1B

The US government will never allow Zuck to sell LifeLog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

Regardless of the LifeLog tie exists or not, why not? It's all the same to them if Yahoo! had it, or anybody else still "patriotic" enough

Kindly look into Yahoo's board and large investors at the time. Your answer should be apparent. This isn't about Patriotism, and I'm not sure I understand the scare quotes. It would be just as much about Patriotism as the Patriot Act

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