[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

Fri Mar 7 14:16:10 UTC 2008

Uh... If Wikipedia were a for-profit, but with a designated mission (the
same as the non-profit, in similarity to the Mozilla for-profit co) my guess
is that it would be worth more than Facebook, to start (~15 billion). Unless
there was a rebellion ongoing that forced Jimmy to make it a non-profit,
then he was free to not do so and keep on as things were going. You could
pretty conservatively monetize Wikipedia through ads and other means, and I
think ~15 billion is a low-end estimate.

If you propose that Jimmy donated nothing or very little (including effort,
promotion, etc.), which is frankly ridiculous, you should think about the
future earnings and asset value that he donated to the Foundation. I'm not
sure I could have made the same sacrifice of multiple billions of dollars.

Nathan