have you considered money isn't everything?
And I don't explain this "every chance [I] get". I think about it rarely, and discuss it even less. I've done well enough financially that giving up the Microsoft cash just doesn't matter. I just mention it here because it seemed relevant to the topic at hand.
If you'd have gone with Big Bad Microsoft, a lot of things could have happened. At the instant of deciding - you could have learned how to make decisions based less on emotions and more on logic. You could have helped change the company culture instead of being relatively ineffectual. I wonder - what has your hate-based (I assume) decision really changed for anybody outside of a small Boston startup?
The technology for that is not available yet.
It's interesting to speculate what would happen if everyone had perfect knowledge of the ultimate outcome of every decision and optimized them for their own goals. It would be a completely different world.
Being neither Vulcan nor omniscient, just human, I had to make a decision with imperfect information, and my instincts did play a role in that decision. Improving Microsoft corporate culture was not my goal. Improving the world was not my goal. My goal was to work on software that I was driven to write, using technology that I enjoyed using, and to provide a comfortable life for my family. I did all of those things.
I don't "hate" Microsoft, but combining what I knew of myself at the time, with what I observed at the company, I concluded that I would be happier elsewhere.
I used to think this way, and that saddens me... I hope you get over it, too, and realize that other people want and do different things, and not only are they rarely categorically wrong or right, even if you consider them as such, that is your opinion, and it's no more valid or invalid than someone who does something of which you do not approve and comes away from it satisfied.
Also the taxes at the time were much higher; so the impressive $1m starts to look much less impressive when you add in the fact that it probably vested over a very long term and that he was going to be put to work on something he didn't like for a long time.