Mark Cuban did even better with broadcast.com. sold it for billions right at the beginning of the dotcom boom, bought a basketball team.

there was also a guy who sold a browser to Apple for over $100 million.

Wait till you hear about Jan Koum, who took over $10 billion from selling WhatsApp to Facebook and has become a prominent collector of mansions, superyachts, and rare Porsches [3].

1- https://www.dirt.com/gallery/moguls/tech/jan-koum-house-beve...

2- https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/moonrise/owner/

3- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26322/these-are-the-10-drool-w...

Those are some pricey dopamine hits.

He has to live the rest of his life as someone who sold of millions of enthusiastic users to exactly the company we paid them not to become.

Well. I guess he is happy with it. What's worse is I guess most people would take that deal at some point.

What do you mean by “paid them”? I thought WhatsApp was a free service.

Whatsapps whole schtick from the beginning was something "you pay us $1 pr year and we provide you a top tier messaging service without ads and without analyzing you data or your social graph or anything".

I was enthusiastic about it, and possibly even more enthusiastic about it as I finally got my first invoice (yes, they didn't start billing right away, but they were very open about their plans, unlike Telegram who always just said something like "it isn't that expensive anyway, someone is shouldering it and we have a plan").

It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.

You can get bored of anything.

This is a viral "feelgood" story that keeps circulating but MySpace was a project within an existing company, eUniverse, later InterMix. Tom and Chris DeWolfe were employees of InterMix, not founders. Intermix was acquired by News Corp. for $580M. Not sure how much equity Tom ended up with. It certainly could have been enough to allow for a "normal" early retirement but I'm not even sure about that. I had some dealings with Brad Greenspan, the CEO of Intermix, after the MySpace sale. Presumably he had far more equity than Tom or Chris, and let's just say that he did not behave like someone who was financially secure.

The happiness isn’t from the money, it’s from all the friends he made along the way.

According to a complaint about the sell price made by Greenspan at the time [1], he owned about 10% of Intermix. If he’s not financially secure, I think that speaks mostly about his actions after the sale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051004080642/http://www.freemy...