The Founder Of WhatsApp Is Very Sad That He's A Billionaire

Hold on, stop the blog. Please, let’s have a moment of silence for Brian Acton

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Thank you. Now we can read on:

Forbes - WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, 46, sits in a cafe of the glitzy Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, California, and the only way you’d guess he might be worth $3.6 billion is the $20 tip he briskly leaves for his coffee. Sturdily built and wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt from a WhatsApp corporate event, he’s determined to avoid the trappings of wealth and runs his own errands, including dropping off his minivan for maintenance earlier that day. 

It’s also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

Can someone please pass me the world’s smallest violin? I need to play a tune for Brian Acton. You know what they say, sell your business to Facebook for billions of dollars first, worry about feeling bad about it later. I weep for Brian. How will he ever maintain a real life with all that money cramping his bank account?

Like, I get his point, I suppose. He set out to build something, free of ads, to connect the world. But here’s also the thing, he didn’t have to sell. Nobody forced him to become a billionaire. He looked at his options as “become a billionaire” or “don’t sell and let someone else become a billionaire” and he took option A. Great choice! So don’t start asking for sympathy now. You don’t get any! Here’s my rule- you don’t get sympathy if you can afford yacht. If you can buy a boat that has a helicopter pad on it, you don’t get to say “I made a choice and a compromise and I live with that every day”. Bitch your compromise was to get rich as hell! Spare me the sob story, bro.

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This is how the article ends:

He also says he’s determined to raise his kids normally, from public schools to that Honda minivan to a (relatively) modest house. Acton notes, however, that it’s just one mile away from Zuckerberg’s compound. Extreme wealth, it seems, is “not as liberating as you would hope.”

Ugh. I hate how sad it sounds. How now he just wants to live normally and this and that. Well, I devised a solution- give up all your money and get a job like the rest of us, pal. It’s not that hard to do. I know people who would gladly take a billion bucks off his hands so he can drive his mini-van to his kids’ public school. Seems to me he just wants to play both sides- be sad about having all the money, but nottttt quite ready to give up the wealth. So he needs to spare me the feelings. Billionaires these days, so soft.