Silicon Valley's Humble Billionaire | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's Humble Billionaire

businessweek.com

81 pointsMarlonPro17 comments

Something everyone should know about Silicon Valley's "humble" billionaire: he was involved in a very high-profile and nasty divorce case[1] in which he (infamously) tried to screw not just his (ex-)wife but also his children out of the windfall from his Granite options. (This was essentially overturned on appeal[2], and set the precedent for how options are valued on divorce.) Suffice it to say that "humble" is not generally the word used to describe such behavior...

[1] http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.07.99/cover/divor...

[2] http://www.law.com/regionals/ca/opinions/sep/h019424.shtml

So, how on earth is that relevant? In a divorce it is standard practice to screw over the other.

Just because other people have been jackasses does not give you an excuse to be a jackass. I've seen plenty of divorces that ended quite happily because both people were civil to each other. You just don't hear about those because they don't usually make much noise.

But even if you believe that it does justify it, however misguided that is, since when does a divorce ever justify screwing over your children in addition to your spouse? At that point, it's just pure greed.

> screwing over your children

Let me get this straight, Warren Buffet won't fork over his $$$ to his kids because he wants them to learn the value of a dollar and that makes him a hero. But this guy is screwing them over and is greedy? Are you his divorced ex-wife? How do you know what his motivations are for withholding the moola?

His children will not inherit a significant proportion of his wealth. This is consistent with statements he has made in the past indicating his opposition to the transfer of great fortunes from one generation to the next. Buffett once commented, "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing".

Since when is Warren Buffet "screwing over his kids"? He wants to give them enough that they can do ANYTHING. That doesn't sound like "screwing over". If that's "screwing over", I'd love to be screwed over!

And if this billionaire had good reason, perhaps, like Warren Buffet, he would have explained it?

Are you his divorced ex-wife?

Don't you love the smell of ad hominem attacks in the morning?

> Don't you love the smell of ad hominem attacks in the morning?

The "ad hominem fallacy" fallacy is my favorite. Why don't you learn what it means? http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

Even by divorce standards this was acrimonious -- and notable for the degree that not just his spouse but his kids were affected. Of course, that itself might not be relevant to an arbitrary article on Cheriton's entrepreneurial history -- but it is (in my opinion) very relevant to an article that speaks to his putative "humility"...

According to the first link, he hadn't even co-founded his venture at the time of filing for divorce. What exactly entitles her to riches from generated by a company she didn't contribute to?

For that matter, how are children entitled to wealth just because they have a wealthy parent? I fully support the idea of forcing parents to meet their children's basic needs, but nobody is entitled to a child support payment of more than the median income for a working adult in their country.

For those who didn't click through:

>"One fall morning David Cheriton told his wife that he wanted to end the marriage (according to a friend of Iris', he broke the news only one hour after she had found out that her mother had died). He filed for divorce shortly thereafter.

>Less than a year later, David Cheriton took a leave of absence from Stanford to work at a startup he co-founded with Andreas Bechtolscheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. The pair's nascent computer networking company soon caught the attention of Cisco Systems, which bought Granite for $220 million in April 1996.

>As part of the buyout, Cisco granted the 45-year-old professor an option to buy stock with a market value of around $45 million.

>Another overnight Silicon Valley decamillionaire.

>After her husband's incredible windfall, Iris decided that she and the kids should get a piece of the action."

You guys don't really know him. He is humble ... you literally see him walking around campus grabbing lunch at Bytes cafe etc. I walked into his office once and chatted with him one or twice -- only recently found out he had made any money. Secondly, I don't know if preventing people from receiving exorbitant amounts of money they did nothing to earn is "screwing them" ... it might in fact be really good for them.

David Cheriton and humble in the same sentence? What a joke!

You realize that the Waterloo CS school is called the "David Cheriton CS School", yeah? Take that for "humble" :-)

How does that make him less humble? He donated ~25 million to the University, the University decided to name their school of Computer Science after him.

Or did he donate 25 million to have the CS school named after him?

Yes, we don't know, so lets pick the one that is expedient to our biases.

1. It costs a lot of money to rename something like a school: new signage, new namecards, new letterheads, etc. etc. Money that could instead be used on education.

2. Once a school is named after a person, that significantly reduces the likelihood of a future donor who would only donate if their name were adopted.

Given the above actual cost and opportunity cost, some might find it reasonable to guess that schools only ever rename themselves after rich but less-well-known (i.e. not Nobel-prize-winning) people if the donation is contingent on it.

> When asked to opine on the timeless Silicon Valley issues—a lack of visas for foreigners, meddling venture capitalists, and government regulations— David Cheriton balks. “I hate to sound like Pollyanna,” he says. “But if those are the biggest problems, we should be getting up in the morning and giving thanks. If you look at what other generations had to deal with, we live in a nirvana right now.”

This 'article' was little more than a bunch of description of how the author felt about various things. No insight, no information relevant to us.

As for living in a nirvana, I think Louis C.K. said it in a far more insightful and entertaining way.

I agree. In merely linking, bcantrill's post above is more insightful and contains more content than the entire OP. Frankly, this article isn't HN material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com