Also, I would openly laugh at anyone who claims that they’d personally turn down 1.63B to keep their business pure. That is an overwhelming amount of money, in the “none of your descendants needs to work” range.

I’d sell out for much, much less money.

Apparently there were many other billion dollar acquisition bids turned down

Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg...

Discord reportedly rejects Microsoft's $12 billion acquisition offer https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/microsoft-12-bill...

Amazon and Alibaba have approached 5-year-old startup Wish, but the CEO seems to want more than $10 billion https://www.businessinsider.com/wish-rumored-to-reject-acqui...

But there's a difference between turning down a bid because you want to maintain control over your vision and because you think your company is just worth more than the offer. The point is just that if you get what you think is a fair offer, and it's a very large offer, it would be hard for most people to say no.

Also of note: Groupon turned down $6B from Google. They now have a market cap of $1.6B 11 years later.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/win-win-daily/win%C2%AD-wi...

It's obviously not impossible for someone to turn down a billion dollar offer because they think it's not enough, or to maintain control over their company. But I think people drastically underestimate how easy it would be to not sell out and walk away. The kind of people who will look at that offer and say "no thanks" are far and few between. There is a non-trivial chance that most of us have not met anyone like that.

Mark Zuckerberg also turned down a $15 Billion dollar offer from Microsoft.

On the contrary if I ever built a business that was worth 100 million or more I'd take far less than my share of it if it meant that I could get a clean exit and not have to stay on as an executive for a few years.

Perhaps my mentality is part of the reason why I will never build such a thing.

Not all of that money will go to the founders.

Most of it won't, there's only one founder and from what I understand his share is less than what you'd expect. I imagine all the early employees did pretty well from this though.