It's possible Tim Berners-Lee gave up hundreds of billions.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.
It is not possible he could have thought that in 1992. It’s probably not even possible that he passed up one billion. Had he tried he’d likely have lost out to open standards like so many others did.
You could prove me wrong easily. Find someone who raised (inflation adjusted) tens of billions, had the opportunity to make trillions, and declined. You can’t. You can likely take that down two orders of magnitude and still not succeed.
People who did some work on their own and open sourced something small that turned into something huge are not even close to what we’re talking here. They didn’t turn down a trillion, they turned down $100k that turned into a trillion later.
It isn’t about integrity. It’s about how humans rationalize. “Nobody is being hurt here.” “This can improve humanity.” “I’ll do good things with the money.”
It’s easy to say people have “integrity” when you just define it as adhering to your belief system when the stakes seem low, not their belief system when the stakes are clearly high.
Right but you’re defining integrity in a different way than anyone who has ever raised $10b and had a company (or whatever you want to call OpenAI, I have never really known how to refer to its unique arrangement) that was worth $150b and rapidly climbing.
They would tell you (and sincerely believe it) that it being a for profit is better for a whole list of reasons. They believe they have integrity. They don’t believe they’ve lost their soul. They believe they’re doing a whole lot of good for the world.
That’s my point. The denizens of HN think they lack integrity for this, I think they just define it differently and anyone playing for trillions would define it their way.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.