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Comment by jburwell | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry, but this article is inane. At the time he cashed out, there were no guarantees regarding the size of the eventual liquidity event. He cashed out a portion of his stake for an assured $340 million which is more than enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life (and likely a few succeeding generations). Why does it matter that he might not have missed an "opportunity" to be a billionaire? I guess the author has never heard the phrase, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

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It's amazing how Forbes has fallen in the last 10yrs. It used to be the go to magazine along with fortune but Forbes now looks like a collection of amateur blog posts with sensationalist headlines to get clicks.

Absolutely, they love their lists that make you click through 10+ pages reloading ads every time.

Not to mention all these ads and sharing buttons with poor taste

Ev was a seasoned entrepreneur at the point he sold that stake, definitely a smart move to take something off the table. $340 million is an immense amount of 'fuck you' money for something that had no business strategy at the time. Twitter could have very easily gone the way of Tumblr, resulting in a loss of 2/3 of Ev's value (and Tumblr is a wildly successful example).

Exactly, even if we assume insanely bad planning so he exercises and sells shares on the same day making them ordinary income (resulting in about 49% paid in taxes, (38% federal, 11% state) that would net him like 170M$ which just sitting in a t-bill ladder at 1% would give him 1.7M/year tax free income, forever. I could probably squeeze by on that :-)

> Why does it matter that he might not have missed an "opportunity" to be a billionaire?

Because Forbes is a magazine that is published by billionaires, for billionaires.

Completely agree.

What's the difference between $340 million and over $1 billion? Bigger boat. Bigger plane. Other than that, nothing.

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