[sashank_1509]

The very first startup I joined after grad school allowed all employees to cash out significant chunks of their stock in the Series A round.

Also Elon famously put 200 million of his own money into Tesla and SpaceX to keep it afloat, which is the opposite of cashing out early.

[mapt]

If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth. Your living expenses are already generously compensated for by the large salary that you, the VC fund pays you, the person, out of your personal bank account, and they will be paying you those expenses until the end of your natural life. This isn't "risk" in the same sense as somebody who jumps to supplement their $150k salary with $450k of founder liquidity because it dramatically changes the material security of their life.

[robertlagrant]

> If you have 200 million "of your own money" to spare, you are no longer just a person for the purposes of this conversation, you're a walking VC fund, and you're not really risking a substantial change to your quality of life going from 250M to 50M net worth.

Is that what happened? I thought he had $200m, and put in $200m.

[oblio]

Do we know this story from any credible source or are we just trusting Musk's (a famous liar) word about it?

[robertlagrant]

It's true that that's what I thought, which is my statement. And it's better caveated than the previous one, which implied uncaveated that he still had $50m, but hasn't attracted the eye of any budding skeptics.

[rmbyrro]

You may dislike Elon, but it's pretty absurd to say that what he did is trivial.

[llamaimperative]

GP didn’t

[throwbigdata]

Life is very different at $50M v $250M

[Tepix]

Is it?

[BoorishBears]

It's not really compared to an average person's life, but in SV tradition never let the chance to subtly flaunt a wealth gap pass by freely

(This is the part where you say "Yes, having lived both <insert revelation>")

[shermantanktop]

Has 50M: wishes they had 250M

Has 250M: wishes they had 1B

[gafferongames]

Tres Commas

[kelnos]

It depends on the kind of lifestyle you want to live, I guess. If you want to live in a $30M mansion estate with 24/7 domestic staff and have several vacation homes around the world, $50M might not cut it, while $250M should cover it just fine.

If you have a philanthropic bent and want to be able to fund various charities to the tune of $5M or $10M per year (in addition to a reasonably luxurious lifestyle, though considerably less than the above hypothetical), $50M might not be enough to sustain that over time, but $250M probably will.

I think it's fair to say that there's not much difference between net worths of $25M and $50M, or between $50M and $75M. But jumping an order of magnitude from $50M to $250M will let you live a very different kind of life, if you so choose.

[fooker]

50m is the upper echelons of private chaffeur money, 250m is the lower echelons of private jet money.

[romwell]

> to keep it afloat

Can't "cash out" (early or not) if your company is sinking.

[gorbachev]

Private equity firms do exactly this.

[eru]

You totally can. That's what investor money is for.

[phlo]

Adam Neumann begs to differ.

[kelnos]

Exception that proves the rule, perhaps?

[KennyBlanken]

...while he was getting loaned $200,000 a month for personal expenses by his billionaire buddies.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/the-crucial-decision-teslas-...

Also, that may have kept tesla and spacex 'afloat' but what really saved both companies was billions upon billions of dollars in government contracts, subsidies, preferential loans, and tax breaks. Nevada alone gave nearly two billion dollars to Tesla.

[petesergeant]

The government is expecting something in return for these breaks rather than them being some kind of gift, though.

[oblio]

The government is not monolithic and politicians might except other things than what their constituents want. It's a bad test of the value of an investment.

[petesergeant]

For sure, and it may well have been a terrible investment with terrible returns, but selling to the government and responding to government incentives is an entirely legitimate thing to do, rather than some kind of inherent weakness in a company’s model. A company being “saved” by a government contract is a company being saved by making sales to its largest customer.

[nick7376182]

And the government got it, in the form of a cost effective usa-based launch solution.

[kelnos]

Expecting, perhaps, but in general there's little to no penalty if those expectations are not realized.