It is not possible he could have thought that in 1992. It’s probably not even possible that he passed up one billion. Had he tried he’d likely have lost out to open standards like so many others did.
You could prove me wrong easily. Find someone who raised (inflation adjusted) tens of billions, had the opportunity to make trillions, and declined. You can’t. You can likely take that down two orders of magnitude and still not succeed.
People who did some work on their own and open sourced something small that turned into something huge are not even close to what we’re talking here. They didn’t turn down a trillion, they turned down $100k that turned into a trillion later.
It isn’t about integrity. It’s about how humans rationalize. “Nobody is being hurt here.” “This can improve humanity.” “I’ll do good things with the money.”
It’s easy to say people have “integrity” when you just define it as adhering to your belief system when the stakes seem low, not their belief system when the stakes are clearly high.
