Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has renounced his US
citizenship in order to avoid a boatload of taxes after Facebook’s
$15 Billion IPO. … This is the story of how Saverin got so angry at
Zuckerberg—how, from Saverin’s perspective, Zuckerberg
screwed him out of a huge chunk of Facebook stock.
How much did Eduardo get from Zuckerberg?
to worry. Saverin eventually sued Facebook over breach of fiduciary
duty. Facebook and Saverin settled, and he walked away with 4% or
5% of the company. That stake is now worth close to $5
billion.
How much money is Eduardo Saverin worth?
14 billion USD (2020)
To ease Saverin out and limit his say over how Facebook
would be funded, Zuckerberg reduced Saverin’s stake in the
company.
Zuckerberg did this by creating a new company to acquire the old
company and then distribute new shares in the new company to
everybody but Saverin.
Well now, thanks to a well-placed source, we’ve come up with
something cool.
It’s the email then 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg sent his lawyer
giving him the go ahead to draft paperwork that would result in
Saverin’s dilution.
We love the email because it’s an artifact of a young Mark
Zuckerberg – a man who has grown up a lot since he wrote it, and
will be in our lives for a very long time.
The fun part is where Zuckerberg says to his lawyer: “Is there a
way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that
he’s being diluted to 10%?”
The full letter:
This email should probably be attorney-client privileged, not
quite how to do that though.
Anyhow, Sean and I have agreed that a price of one-half cent per
share is the way to go for now. We think we can maybe almost
justify and if not, we’ll just deal with it later.
We also agreed that if the company bonusing us the amount we
need for the shares, plus tax, is a good solution to the problem of
us all being completely broke.
As far as Eduardo goes, I think it’s safe to ask for his
permission to make grants. Especially if we do it in conjunction
with raising money. It’s probably even OK to say how many shares
we’re adding to the pool. It’s probably less OK to tell him who’s
getting the shares, just because he might have adverse reaction
initially. But I think we may even be able to make him understand
that.
Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent
to him that he’s being diluted to 10%?
OK, that’s all for now. I’ll send you the list of grants I need
made in another email in a second. Sean can send you grants for his
people when he stops coughing up his lungs.
Hope you guys both feel better, Mark
Andrei
Tapalaga 
Steve Jobs’ Dark Past
The time Steve Job’s cheated his way to success
Image source: (Photo by Reuters) Steve Wozniak on Breakout, Atari
and Steve Jobs
I believe that most people have a
dark past, a past that they wish won’t come to light, but sooner or
later you have to take that pressure off your chest and come clean.
This is what Steve Jobs did about the fact of how he tricked his
best friend into working all night long for several days and then
cheating him out of his paycheck. This proved to be only the first
offense in a long litany of his penchant for pettiness and
pointless cruelty.
The friend that I am talking about is
Steve Wozniak, him and Jobs were working at Atari, one of the first
video game consoles which revolutionized the video game market. The
owner of Atari at the time was its actual founder by the name of
Nolan Bushnell. The first game that came out was “Pong,” a classic
which many people remember. Due to its high success, Bushnell
thought of making a sequel that would be only a single-player and
call it “Breakout” in 1975.
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Appearances can be deceiving
For this project, Bushnell was
thinking of tasking Steve Jobs to be in charge and take care of the
project. Jobs was considered (at the time) a low-level Atari
technician with huge potential. As this game was expected to be
much better than its predecessor, Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak, who
was known on the market as the better engineer. Jobs and Wozniak
had been friends for quite some time at that point. They both were
working towards the Macintosh which would follow to become the most
iconic computer around the world for four long years so they got to
spend a lot of time together.
The way that Atari worked was by
offering a monetary bonus for every chip fewer than fifty that was
used when building a game. Wozniak was ecstatic when Jobs asked him
to help with this big project. This is when Jobs started to lie to
Wozniak in order to use him for his expertise. He told Wozniak that
the deadline was four days and that he had to use as few chips as
possible. The truth is that Jobs was given a whole month for this
project, not four days.
Jobs never told Wozniak about the
bonus for using fewer chips and the four-day deadline was
self-imposed by Jobs, as he needed to get back to his commune farm
to help bring in the apple harvest. It is imperative to mention
(for those who are not aware) that Steve Jobs came from a very poor
background.
Wozniak was working for
Hewlett-Packard at the time as well, so he had to balance his main
job as well as this project. So he would end up going to his job in
the day time and spending most of the night working on “Breakout”.
The only thing that Steve did was implementing the required chips,
making sure that there were less than fifty chips. Their herculean
efforts succeeded, as they finished the game in four days and only
using forty-five chips.
When payday
came, Steve Jobs only gave Wozniak half the pay, he kept the rest
of his pay as well as the bonus for himself.
Wozniak only found out about this ten
years later. He is quoted in the Isaacson biography Steve Jobs:
“When he talks about it now, there are
long pauses, and he admits it causes him pain.”“I wish he had just been honest. If he
had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have
just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.”“Ethics always mattered to me, and I
still don’t understand why he would have gotten paid one thing and
told me he’d gotten paid another. But, you know, people are
different.”
Wozniak, to his credit, did not hold
this against Jobs in later years. The reason why Jobs did this is
unknown to the public, many think it was his need for money to keep
on working at the Macintosh, whilst others say that those are his
true colors. I am not here to judge Steve Jobs as I believe we all,
at some point in time, chose the wrong path, especially in our
younger years.