That doesn’t cut it. Doing the same job at other engineering firms without any shares in the company Don and Chris would have been making about the same. He hasn’t made them rich in reasonable terms anymore than them earning $10,000 a year and pointing out how much more that is over what a south sea islander earns for picking coconuts.
Again, it sounds like you’re getting all of this from Dave. Have you even asked Don for his side of the story?
I have already said that in Don’s place I would sell. I just don’t see any way to call it an ethically justifiable action.
If Don and Christopher felt held back, they could have left at any time during the 15 or so years they’ve been working there…
Several other posters have pointed out, I think rightly, that thethreat title is a misnomer, that the salary Don is getting is way past middle-class. Maybe you disagree. So let me ask you: how much money would Don have to be making for you to consider him rich in reaonable terms? A million a year? More?
While Dave, Don, and Chris DO in fact have real-world antecedents, the scenario is made up. And if Dave’s inspiration were to show up right now, I woukldn’t be asking his opinion, I’d be calling the Ghostbusters.
Yup, this nails it.
Sometimes in life your ethics clash. You have promises to keep to more than one party and you can’t keep them all. You owe your kids more than you owe your business partner.
Missed hte edit window.
TRIPOLAR. If Dave agrees to the sale for love of Don but refuses to work for RI, and so the offer goes from three billion to one (reducing Don’s payout 333 million), has Dave betrayed Don? Is he holding Don back by refusing to work for a company he finds odious?
I don’t believe that off-the-cuff casual ‘promises’ extend forever and in all circumstances, and real people simply don’t operate that way. If I promise that I’ll make it to Jack’s wedding when we’re hanging out in college one night, I’d not think twice about breaking it years later if my mother’s in the hospital and I need to be there, or if he does a destination wedding that I can’t actually afford. If Sam offers me his old gaming console as long as I use it and don’t sell it, I’m going to use it in the short term, but not feel any qualm about selling it ten years later when I’m cleaning up things I don’t use anymore, or if it suddenly turns out that it’s a collector’s item and is worth the $50,000 to treat my kid’s Leukemia.
For me to consider a promise binding over the course of decades, above helping my family, and involving life- and world- changing sums of money, I’d need to cover all of the background assumptions and implications and time limits with the person. That’s not a ‘sure, I won’t sell out buddy’, but a long detailed discussion along the lines of negotiating a formal contract. If it’s involving a significant amount of money, I’d definitely want it explicitly spelled out in written form too. From the sound of the hypothetical, Dave and Don didn’t do this, so I see no ethical problem with Don deciding that the current situation is vastly out of the scope of the casual promise. I have absolutely no ethical problem with putting realistic limitations on the scope and duration of an off-hand agreement.
Dave is a friend, not a slave. He’s free to quit his job anytime he wants, the idea that he’s obligated to work in a way that violates his principles so that his friend can profit is nuts. It’s even sillier in this case, where Don is making the money by breaking an agreement (even a casual one) with Dave.
Unless the multinational has completely incompetent lawyers, the contract for sale is going to include the intellectual property, and getting rid of the patents is going to void the deal automatically, leaving them without the billions. Even if their lawyers screw up initially, as soon as they see that they aren’t getting the patents that they were buying the company for, they’ll allege fraud and refuse to pay, so Don and Heather will get to spend years hanging out in court rooms instead of cruise ships trying to argue that they should get paid.
You should watch it. It’s a very funny take on the tech industry by Mike Judge (Office Space, Idiocracy). Basically it’s about a group of friends who form a tech start up potentially worth billions and how they negotiate the world of Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists.
A reoccurring them is that they want their company to become a billion dollar company on their own terms. They aren’t as moralistic as Dave (in fact, one of the lead engineers is a declared Satanist). But they are constantly faced with difficult and often moral choices about taking money or relinquishing control of their firm or risk going out of business. But their choices are usually “a couple million now or potentially billions later, but also potentially out of business next week”.
Honestly, a billion dollars is a lot of money to turn down. If I thought DCD was going to get to be a multi-billion dollar company anyway, I might pull a Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) and say “no”, but that doesn’t sound like the case here. And I’m pretty sure Spiegal will be kicking himself in a few years if the tech bubble bursts again and he never gets a better offer.
I doubt this was a casual promise. It was something that the guys discussed when setting up the company. If Don & Christopher had not believed that Dave’s genius could make them at least very well off, they would not have ponied up the cash.
That said, it’s not legally enforceable, and only Jesus, Buddha, and Captain America could be expected to keep it. And of those three, the first can become rich at will but choose no to;the second rejects material possessions; and the third is too busy fighing Nazis to have ever accumulated any investment capital.
(Anyone who gives any credit to that ridiculous notion that Cap has always been a HYDRA agent will be fed to the orcas.)
I said it was unethical also, except if Dave had broken the agreement first, so I’m just looking at that possibility.
Perhaps not without selling there interest, being principals in one company might make it difficult for them to find other work in their area of expertise. And Dave would have to keep his promise to make them rich.
Sorry, but depending on where you live $250,000 a year is still considered middle-class by many. At the top end of the range yes, but not rich. They could be saddled with mortgages, only recently paid off their student loans, and 250 grand is not much for the lifestyle expected for partners in a high tech engineering firm. If they are in silicon valley it is definitely only middle-class income.
Well you say it’s made up, but you make up a lot of things, so maybe you’re making up that it’s made up.
One billion would make Don rich, he couldn’t say Dave hasn’t fulfilled his obligation.
In comparison to a billion dollar deal, anything not written down is just a casual promise. Especially when it’s trivially possible to set up a legally binding contract or corporate structure to enforce the no sale agreement. The idea that it’s unethical to put reasonable limits on what a promise means is just absurd, saying “I’ll go to your wedding” is not a suicide pact.
I’m not much of a comic book reader, but I’m not really sure why people who read a medium where there is routinely mind control, body duplication, robot impersonators, alternate time lines, magic, and more have decided that none of that could possibly involved in the current story line.
Dude. The orca remark IS A JOKE.
The Cap-ha-always-been-a-double-agent-since-the-day-he-came-out-of-the-ice is just a current storyline. It’ll be undone the same way Superman’s permanent death was.
Right. I’m secretly a bisexual superhero with the power of a god and a love of video games. My best friend from childhood is a ruthless technomagicic warlord who is currently semi-retired from villainy because the goddess Athena has him on a short leash, but one still would be well advised not to trust him.
I don’t discount the possibility.
If all 3 have equal ownership stakes, it’s not Dave’s company, even if he’s the one with the bright ideas. The assumption is that Don and Chris put in a large part of the starting capital, while Dave provided the brainpower.
The fact that DCD only generated a 250k income for the 3 owners, yet RI is willing to pay upwards of 3 billion dollars for the company tends to imply (absent some kind of recent, groundbreaking patent), that the 3 owners were all totally on board with owning a company with the potential to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year, and yet somehow sat on that out of respect for Dave’s ideological beliefs. I find that extraordinarily hard to believe, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, ultimately Don and Heather’s obligations lie first with their families, not with Dave’s mush-headed ideology.
Then how are Peter Jackson and J. J. Abrams still alive?
Heather has no obligation not to sell. She’s done nothing unehtical.
As I see it, DCD is funnelling most of its revenue back into research. Dve doesn’t care about compensation much, but Don & Heather can easily increase howo much money they’re getting. (But bear in mind that the OP says they get $250K in SALARY.) If DCD has tens of millions in revenue the two owners who do care about personal income can override Dave and say, “Yeah, we want a million dollars a year each,” without breaking their word (or, rather, Don’s word) and stillkeeping Dave happy by doing basic research
In short, Don has an avenue to make himself rich without doing anything dishonorable He won’t be Bill Gates, but he’ll be Kobe Bryant.
Yes, Don is ethically bound to honor his promise to Dave. A promise is a promise. Don may certainly attempt to reason with Dave, and try to persuade him that the buyout makes good sense, will help their families a lot, and that Dave may then use his newfound loot to support the causes in which he believes. But unless Dave releases him from his promise, Don should not go back on it. Money - even truckloads of money - is less important than integrity and honor.
Not to hijack Skald’s thread, but where or when does this power end? Does the promisee hold essentially permanent, unlimited dominion over the promiser?
What if, instead of billions, it’s a matter of a struggling, indebted, Don being able to feed his family?
Skald, I hope you don’t mind my taking your hypothetical down a different permutation:
The way you’ve written up this story, it seems analogous to this:
Imagine if Dave makes Don promise, “Promise me you’ll never set foot in Chicago. I absolutely hate that city and I can only do business with partners who avoid that city like I do.” Don promises, OK, sure, I won’t go to Chicago.
But then one day Don wins the lottery; $200 million. There’s one catch, though: In order to cash in the ticket, Don needs to physically appear at the lottery headquarters…in Chicago. There is no other way for him to claim his jackpot otherwise.
If, at this time, Dave insists to Don, “No, you can’t cash your $200 million, life-changing lottery ticket because you *promised *me you would never set foot in Chicago,” wouldn’t the near-unanimous opinion of the SDMB be that it’s Dave who is being unreasonable?
How am I supposed to determine that those are the real Peter Jackson and J.J. Abrams? The real ones could be dead, or tied up in some warehouse, or held in stasis on the moon or something. You may think you’re clever but I’m not falling for the old “Why aren’t they dead” routine. I don’t even know if you’re the real Skald instead of your best friend supervillain assuming your identity. Now I have to figure out a question only the real Skald would know the answer to.
But it ISN’T a matter of that. It’s a matter of Don wanting to buy a mansion.
If Don were poor, then the implicit part of his bargain with Dave – that the association with Dave would make him rich – would not have been kept. But Dave’s pulling down 6 figures. He just wants to go from moderately well off to filthy rich.
Not a good analogy. In your tale, nothing about Dave’s life changes if Don goes to Chicago. In the original, Dave loses control of his life’s work to a company he actively disapproves of on a moral level. They both lose control of hteir compan. And, depending on how literal “warmonger” is, Dave may see inventions he intended to be used for good being used to kill people.
In your lottery scenario, Don can simply walk away from DCD without substantially changing Dave’s life or business. Don should obviously take the cash and go to the Windy City, because of Dave doesn’t get over THAT, he’s nuts.
In Don’s place I would quite possibly take the billion bucks (though first I would to persuade Heather to instead vote to up the compensation package, so the owners are receiving seven figure salaries). I just am willing to admit that selling out is dishonorable and unethical.
OK yeah, I see now.
I do think there’s much potential for a certain tyranny here; the promisee’s tyranny of “You are never released from this promise until I say so.”
And while Don is financially well off, it is still a steep sacrifice to give up a Powerball-sized fortune for no reason other than his friend’s qualms.
The main philosophical issue being, when do/should practical considerations override a promise.