> Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View.
I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here
You’re not the only one.
EDIT: The comment below points out that Speedera took $51M in funding
$14/share * 12 million shares ~= $168 million
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2005-press/aka...
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/AKAM/historical?...
http://www.d.umn.edu/external-affairs/homepage/12/swildens.h...
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Los-Altos-Hills-CA/pmf...
For a non-profitable move that is probably not even tax deductible, $6,000 is not a trivial investment.
The rest of the story seems to support his story that he did this on his own, especially because from the way the journalist describe the court proceedings it seems like Uber didn't capitalize on his work at the right time when they could have if they were aware of it.
Also, this article was published yesterday which is multiple court proceedings after his work was submitted to the USPTO and what was supposed to be court date. If this is a PR effort I would have expected it to be done a bit earlier.
It's almost like he's trying to make himself seem more relatable by saying the fee was a bigger deal for him than it actually was. To me, it comes off like he's trying to hide something
Why do you think $6k is not a consideration given his liquid capital? What do you expect his liquid wealth to be and what do you base that on?
Just to put it in perspective: 6k USD is 0,6% of 1M USD. If I got a savings of 10k USD, and I donate 0,6% of that to EFF during Christmas, then we're talking about 60 USD while I keep 9940 USD or 99,4%.
Even that doesn't tell us much though because your networth isn't descriptive to your income. If you own 0,5M but you don't have income that's something different than owning 0,5k but having 2k to spend every month.
I think this is the key. Having a big fancy house usually comes with a big fancy mortgage, and who knows what his cashflow looks like. Did he invest his windfall and lose it? Did the tax man take it? Did his wife leave him soon after along with "half"? Any massive medical situations he's dealt with in his family? Is he heavily invested in a new project?
The claim is not that $6,000 is a hardship to him, just that it is not "a drop in the bucket". Ie, $6K is not an amount he would spend unthinkingly because of having so much money. Depending on where you live it's not odd to know people in houses worth over a million but who couldn't pick up a another car because the monthly payments would be too much. Technically they can afford it, but practically it's not "a drop in the bucket", so they have other priorities.
As I said initially, I don't mean "all rich people", not by a long shot -- but anyone who is rich and still a fully fledged human being will know even more of the people I'm talking about than I do -- and there's plenty of poor people who are petty, too. Idiocy and insanity don't care much for class. But just because people do something doesn't mean there is a good reason for it, sometimes it's really just psychopathology combined with not having anyone who is strong enough and cares for them enough, and/or no accidents of life, that force them to stop going deeper into their dead end. They need help, not excuses. That is not aimed at the person in the article, just generally.