[DecayingOrganic]

Great charitable interpretations! I wish you had done this impartially for both parties, but no worries! Now, let's look at the situation realistically. Let's say that instead of Steve's side asking for clarifications, he had agreed to pay Christian $10M when he said "I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We're good. That's mostly a joke." Would Christian then say, "Oh no, I was merely making a joke," or would he accept the offer?

And do you think if Steve had made this offer, would we have even heard a second of this recording?

I mean, come on guys. He literally said "I can make it easy on you," named a price, and then clarified that he was mostly joking.

edit: Thank you for catching that! I've now changed "Steve" with "Steve's side."

[kaba0]

You are misinterpreting the whole situation. The price/selling is not even the “misunderstandable” part — there is no evil in telling a company that they could earn back half of their “lost” opportunity cost by buying out Christian’s app. It was quite clearly a joke (that didn’t land), but what exactly is evil about that, besides possibly Apollo’s community’s hurt feelings?

The misinterpretation came from the ‘quieting down’ expression, which referred to the API usage (I think quite obviously).

[mustacheemperor]

>I wish you had done this impartially for both parties

instead of your thought experiment, I'd request you just pose your impartial take on the most charitable view for Steve and explain why in that view it was a reasonable act of good leadership for him to make these comments. Otherwise I don't think we're really talking about the same thing.

You've quoted the transcript elsewhere for people to "decide for themselves" and I'm not sure how you could be convinced we all did in fact read it and already did, and just don't agree with you.

[DecayingOrganic]

Well, I don't agree with myself too anymore! I stand correct, and I apologize for the confusion I created with my poor argument. I need to read more carefully.

[lapcat]

> Let's say that instead of Steve asking for clarifications

It was not Steve on the call, it was an unnamed Reddit employee. Christian makes this clear in his post.