I had a look into this a while back, I could only find a single person who became a startup paper billionaire and then lost it (Jay Walker of Priceline.com), I suspect that the reason for this might be that while valuations may be off, they're unlikely to be off by an order of magnitude.
Meh. Good for them, but fawning over these guys is like aspiring to be the next Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. The startup media focuses too much on the outright winners instead of... I don't know... not failing?
If you aspire to be Michael Jordan and you fail, you still might be pretty good at basketball. If you aspire to not fail and you fail, you've just failed.
I'd be willing to bet there's ill gotten gains involved somewhere on that guy. He's only 35 and was previously involved in Ukranian oil & gas. There's a lot of shadowy players in that market.
People buy eggs and eat them every day -- either by themselves or in pasta, bread, or various other products. Long-term prognosis of that business is excellent. How much do people buy daily on Facebook?
> Another Facebook co-founder, Saverin was given a sympathetic portrayal in the 2010 movie The Social Network.
What exactly was so sympathetic about being portrayed as a guy who could not separate emotion from business, was terrible with girls, nearly destroyed his own business by closing the account, let himself be tricked into giving away his stock. He got off more poorly than Sean Parker.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadI expect to see a lot of these names dropping off the billionaire list as quickly as they got onto it.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Catch-22#Chapter_22
I wonder how volatile is their fortune.
What exactly was so sympathetic about being portrayed as a guy who could not separate emotion from business, was terrible with girls, nearly destroyed his own business by closing the account, let himself be tricked into giving away his stock. He got off more poorly than Sean Parker.