Allow me a brief personal lamentation. A few blocks from my home is one of the prettiest places in Palo Alto;
Did I use the present tense “is”? I guess that’s no longer appropriate. Because I drove by it yesterday and saw this……….
Yep. This gorgeous, beautiful, large home, one of the prides of the city, was laid waste. Why? Because of this guy:
The chap shown is Brian Acton, one of Palo Alto’s newer billionaires. He didn’t just buy the house above and blow it up. He bought the entire block of houses.
How much did it cost? $86 million. And how much money is it to Mr. Acton? Practically rounding error. Put it this way: he decided to leave Facebook early and abandon $850 million in unvested options. In other words, he voluntarily walked away from ten times the amount of his real estate purchases, just because he was sick of FB.
You may not recall, but when WhatApp was bought for $19 billion, they had fifty-five employees. So every single one of them either got insanely rich or insanely, incredibly rich. Some of them used their winnings to buy and then destroy beautiful homes. Other former Whatsapp employees elected to secure Ukrainian supermodel girlfriends. (Or maybe she just likes him for his looks).
I guess I’d better get used to it.
