[waterlesscloud]

Say Tim Cook cashes out $50 million in Apple stock today. Say in a year that same stock was only worth $40 million.

Would you then say that he walked away with $10 million more than the actual value he created?

The point here is that at the time the founder cashed out his $2 million in equity, it had a value of $2 million. Not zero, not nothing. And the financiers obviously agreed, and took that equity in return.

You can't judge the deal by the direction the value took later.

[tptacek]

Sorry, but over short time frames the deal gets asymptotically easier to judge as the value approaches zero.