10 People Who Famously Missed out on Millions

People who famously lost millions -  Nolan Bushnell

Everyone makes mistakes, it’s part of being human. Even those who are perfectionists can make mistakes from time to time. Sometimes we can slip up in an embarrassing way, but that mistake generally doesn’t alter the course of our life. But then again, some mistakes are obviously very costly. This is definitely apparent when it comes to business. Not everyone makes the best business decisions, and sometimes their actions have caused them to miss out on millions of dollars. So what are some of the biggest business blunders that people have made that costed them almost everything? In this article we are going to take a look at ten people who famously missed out on millions.

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Sahil Lavingia

10. Sahil Lavingia

Sahil Lavingia was a teenager who had dreams of working for a tech company. Pinterest, the massive image-based social media site, would end up brining him on their team as their second employee ever. As often with startups, he received an okay salary but was given a considerable amount of stock options. After just 11 months with the company, Lavingia left before his stock options vested. We don’t know what his options were, but considering he was the second employee ever and Pinterest is now worth around $4 billion, he probably missed out on a lot.

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Kevin rose

9. Kevin Rose 

Founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, Digg was a popular news aggregating website that used to be one of the most popular websites on the internet. The site quickly rose to prominence and almost everyone was using it. Naturally when websites or companies get big, larger ones look to buy them out. Google allegedly offered Rose some $200 million for Digg, but that was just a rumor. However we do know that they were offered $80 million from an anonymous buyer, but Rose declined to sell. The company then soon began to tank, and it was eventually sold for just $500,000 dollars.

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Mark Cuban

8. Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is already a multi-billionaire, but he probably would have been even richer if he didn’t back out of a past business deal. Box is an enterprise cloud service startup, and Mark initially got in at the ground floor with a $350,000 dollar investment. However Cuban ended up disagreeing with their business model and their founder, Aaron Levie, which lead Levie to eventually buy Cuban out. Box would go on to raise around $400 million from other investors and then received a $2 billion dollar valuation right before they went public.

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Joe Green

7. Joe Green 

Joe Green used to be roommates with Mark Zuckerberg back when they attended Harvard. Naturally, they often worked together on some of their projects. As Mark and his team began working on Facebook, he asked Joe if he wanted to join them. However Joe’s father persuaded him to not work with Mark, so he declined. It’s believed that he would have received a 5% stake which would be worth around $7 billion today.

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James Altucher

6. James Altucher

James Altucher is a venture capitalist who missed out on the deal of his lifetime. Back in the early days of Google, the company was seeking funding to get things rolling. The story goes that Altucher was approached by a Google executive that was seeking $1 million dollars for a 20% stake. However Altucher believed the deal was just too small to consider, so he passed. Google is now worth around $442 billion or so.

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Ron Conway

5. Ron Conway 

Ron Conway is an investor who founded the angel investment firm known as SV Angel. Back in the day, he had reportedly received offers from both Pandora and Salesforce.com, yet he decided to pass on both of those investments. Today, Pandora is worth around $3.7 billion and Salesforce.com is worth around $47.1 billion.

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Hewlett-Packard

4. The entire executive team of HP during the 1970’s

Before Apple was a company and just more of an idea, co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak worked for Hewlett-Packard. After he teamed up with Jobs, they created some computers in their garage which would eventually become the Apple 1 computer. Wozniak took the computer to HP and offered them to manufacture it not once, but five times. They passed each time, and Wozniak and Jobs would go on to create Apple on their own.

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Nolan Bushnell

3. Nolan Bushnell 

Nolan Bushnell is an American buniessman and entrepreneur that is best known for being the founder of Atari. When he founded Atari he would eventually bring on a new employe, who was none other than Steve Jobs. Once Jobs and Wozniak got Apple off the ground, Jobs approached Nolan seeking a $50,000 investment to potentially own 1/3rd of the company. He turned the offer down, and now Apple is worth around $653 billion dollars.

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Jerry Yang

2. Jerry Yang 

Jerry Yang was a co-founder and the former CEO of Yahoo. During his time at Yahoo, the company quickly grew in size and popularity. Then in 2008, Microsoft was looking to acquire a search engine. So they offered to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. However Yang turned the offer down, which caused investors and Yahoo’s board to become extremely unhappy. The company quickly began loosing money, and Yang eventually left the company over the criticism around this missed opportunity.

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Ronald Wayne

1. Ronald Wayne

Most people know that Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but there was a third founder as well: Ronald Wayne. He got in with Apple when they were still operating out of a garage. He was one of the first backers of the company, and provided Jobs and Wozniak with an $800 dollar investment for a 10% stake in the company. He even helped come up with the logo. But just two weeks later, Wayne got cold feet and backed out of the company. If he stuck with them, his investment would be worth around $40 billion or so today.

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Written by Sebastian Hensiek

From Philadelphia, Sebastian is a fan of music, writing, art, and entertainment.