An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?
If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.
My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.
Yeah, that's the problem with this. Should one get the present day value of the shares (a billion), or present day value of the worth at that time (thousands)?
It's a bit the same as people making fun of someone buying a pizza with bitcoin, now worth a hundred thousand. It wasn't at the time, and most likely people would've sold it long before when it started to rise. And the hindsight should then be just as much "if you bought a pizza at the time in USD, why didn't you buy bitcoin instead??".
So to me one should get the latter of the two alternatives. People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.
> People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.
I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.
He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.
He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.
jonas21 · · focus · HN ↗
If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.
My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.
matsemann · · focus · HN ↗
It's a bit the same as people making fun of someone buying a pizza with bitcoin, now worth a hundred thousand. It wasn't at the time, and most likely people would've sold it long before when it started to rise. And the hindsight should then be just as much "if you bought a pizza at the time in USD, why didn't you buy bitcoin instead??".
So to me one should get the latter of the two alternatives. People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.
busyant · · focus · HN ↗
I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.
He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.
He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.