I want the freedom to do what I want, and in my case that involves a certain quantity of money. Not tons of it, but more than I have now.
This really wasn't the appropriate thread to hijack for this discussion anyway; I came here to talk about Erlang.
I'm saying that HN's attention span is dominated by dollar signs.
Even if it's overly optimistic, it's a pretty reasonable aspiration compared to the wage slavery most have to endure, so I fail to see why this is wrong.
There are plenty more of stories of failure studied at HN than successes like WhatsApp. That's actually more correlated with reality than the mainstream business media that focuses mostly on success.
One might argue WhatsApp isn't worth what was paid for, or that the money would be better spent elsewhere. But that's a rather subjective judgement. Spending $16 billion on, say, philanthropic causes, doesn't necessarily lead to desirable or sustainable effects. As with any scarce resource, it depends on how the money is managed.