I call equity "Bison dollars": https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4

It's only worth anything if the world-domination plans go off without a hitch.

"Stock Instead of Real Money" is my new band name. So much meaning in just five words :)

Equity schmequity, and we don't know what Borland did or didn't offer to keep people around. We just know MS offered more.

We know for sure that Borland didn’t offer enough. And we can reasonable speculate that they didn’t offer a significant ownership stake.

Anders got 3mil signing bonus. Hard to counter that.

Easy - give him 4 mil in equity.

On the other hand if the company doesn’t have good prospects, then indeed there is nothing you can do.

Personally I would rather take cash.

You would likely think differently if you cared about the product and had invested time in developing it.

Having said that, there is no evidence their developers felt differently to you.

I do almost nothing but develop products. However as product becomes mature I start looking for new things to do. Also maintenance of mature product requires different type of people, not inventors.

Obviously this isn’t how Anders Hejlsberg, who invented and then ‘maintained’ C# for a decade thinks about things.