It's awful when anyone dies, but I have to confess this seems so much worse to me since he was on the verge of seeing the fruits of his labor result in a historic success.
It was getting hyped up by the tech press and he was doing what he presumably loved right up to the end. I think this was probably a pretty happy point in his life. For me, actually finishing a project like this means a brief rush of satisfaction and then a funk of ennui. I think I'd rather die while I'm still working on something than when it's finished, and certainly it would have been worse to go while the company was still scrounging capital.