[nukkad] How does it feel to loose billions!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Goyal Nitin <>]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tip of the day:  If you are going on vacation, remember to (temporarily) 
unsubscribe from "nukkad". This will avoid a stuffed Inbox.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Indian who lost $10 billion

 By Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON: A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon it adds up
to real money, the late American Senator Everett Dirksen is said to have
remarked in a moment of levity. For a high table of high-tech honchos who
soared to stratospheric heights and joined the billionaires club, it may
well be a case of 'air today, gone tomorrow.'

According to a recent survey in Fortune magazine, at least 20 prominent
tech tycoons have lost more than a billion in the millennium meltdown. Four
of them have lost more than $ 10 billion, and the short list of mega losers
includes one Indian-American, the mercurial, Meerut-born Naveen Jain.

Jain, who founded the Seattle-based content aggregator Infospace after
working at Microsoft for several years has lost $10.13 billion, according
to Fortune. "I'm tired of making money for Bill," the ex-billionaire had
said while quitting. At its peak, Infospace was a $40 billion dollar
company and its stock touched an astronomical $138 for a company with
modest revenues. On Tuesday, it's stock closed at $ 3.97. Jain, who is now
a mere millionaire, is unfazed. "I will get those billions back and then
some," Fortune quoted him as saying. Jain had once said Infospace would be
the world's first trillion-dollar company, although his aides now deny he
ever made the claim.

Topping the list of high-tech humbled is Michael Saylor, who co-founded the
company Microstrategy in the Washington DC area with Indian schoolmate
Sanju Bansal. Fortune estimates Saylor has lost $13.53 billion in the tech
trauma. He is now worth less than $200 million-- no small change but
nothing compared to the big billionaire status he enjoyed only months back.

Saylor had also committed $100 million of his personal money towards
building an online university, a promise he has said he intends to keep
although Microstrategy's downslide continues to be a mega-tragedy. A stock
that once reached $333 closed on Tuesday at $3.64, more than 98 per cent
down.

Shortly before an accounting flub and the dotcom debacle decimated the
stock, Saylor had told The New Yorker, "I just hope I don't get up one day
and have to look at myself in the morrow and say. 'You had $15 billion and
you blew it. There's the guy who flushed $15 billion down the toilet.'"

Following Saylor in the 'bilked-of-billions' club is Amazon.com's Jeff
Bezos who is minus $10.80 billion. At third place is Yahoo! co-founder
David Filo, who is short of $10.31 billion from his peak fortune. Of
course, it needs to be remembered that most of these fortunes consist of
paper money in the form of stock that cannot be easily liquidated.

Fortune has counted only US-based techies, which spares Indian billionaire
Azim Premji the ignominy of joining the ranks. Premji's paper fortune has
shrunk from over $35 billion at its peak to sub-$10billion. Other 'losers'
from position 5-20 Priceline.com founder Jay Walker ($7.51 billion), eBay
chairman Pierre Omidyar ($5 billion), Broadvision CEO Pehong Chen ($4.86
billion), RealNetowrks CEO Rober Glaser ($ 4.33 billion), Ariba Chairman
Ken Krach ($ 2.92 billion), Red Hat chairman William Kaiser ($2.49billion).
When the going was good, Ariba's Ken Krach was once quoted as saying,
"Sometimes you feel like a fly in a nudist camp. You don't know where to
land first because there is so much opportunity."

Presumably, he now knows how it feels to be swatted.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Subscribe [Unsubscribe] send a blank message to 
        nukkad-list-request@mumbai-central.com 
with the word 'subscribe' ['unsubscribe'] (without quotes) in the Subject 
of your message.
The list is archived at  http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/archive.html