A Fitting Price for Wisdom (3)
When I gave David a subtle look again, he took out the contract and handed it to the two of them.
"Continue Capital has purchased every right to the program he created."
Rolf’s eyes went wide.
"What? Jason Kim is dead!"
"He had a wife and children. Her name is Julia Witherspoon. She is Jason Kim’s heir. You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know that, are you?"
"Th-that’s..."
Of course he knew. The email had mentioned it, too.
"So now it’s become a problem we need to settle with you."
Bang!
Rolf slammed both hands down on the table.
"So what the hell do you want us to do!?"
"No, why are you getting angry at me when you’re the one who screwed up?"
Was this what people meant when they said the one who broke wind got furious?
"What exactly do you want!?"
I answered calmly.
"Wisdom has a fair price. According to myth, Odin gave up one of his eyes to drink from Mimir’s spring. What are you willing to give up?"
"What are you saying we should give up? Money?"
"Give me Cooloud."
"What? You bastard..."
Before Rolf could say something useless, Alex cut him off and asked, "You want us to sell the company?"
I waved the lawsuit paperwork.
"Wouldn’t that be better than being buried under lawsuits and barred from using the core program?"
If they refused to sell, then I would proceed with the suit as planned. That was what I was telling them.
"How much?"
"Let’s see. How about five billion dollars?"
Their expressions stiffened.
Honestly, I would have liked to offer a little more, but it couldn’t be helped. I only had five billion dollars in hand right now.
Alex said, "Are you serious?"
"Ah, don’t misunderstand me. I meant your shares, not the company as a whole. So the actual enterprise value would be exactly six point two five billion dollars. That seems fair, doesn’t it?"
"Last time, didn’t you offer to buy it for seventy billion dollars?"
I laughed as if I had no idea what he was talking about.
"That was then. A normal company might be worth seventy billion dollars, but now that we’ve discovered you’ve been using Continue Capital’s program without permission, you can’t seriously expect us to pay that amount in full, can you?"
"..."
Even so, they had probably never imagined the price would fall to less than a tenth of that.
Alex said nothing.
And he had his reasons. The company’s value would only keep rising over time. He wouldn’t want to sell it for a song now.
"Jason Kim’s wife and children were living in a rundown rental, struggling to get by. The day I met her, his wife was working all day as a server in a restaurant just to support her kids. Isn’t that ridiculous? While you two were living large off a company built on a stolen program, the heir who held the rightful claim was breaking her body to earn a few extra dollars."
Their monthly living expenses probably wouldn’t even equal a single day of Rolf’s spending. Cooloud’s corporate valuation had soared without limit, while the family left behind by Jason Kim had only sunk deeper into hardship.
"You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know, are you?"
At my words, Rolf looked flustered and shook his head.
"I-I really didn’t know!"
He truly looked like this was the first he’d heard of it.
That probably wasn’t a lie. More precisely, he had never cared enough to find out how Jason’s family was living.
If he had helped them even under the guise of honoring his dead friend, then his wife would have consulted him before selling the rights to Mimir.
If that had happened, none of this would be going on now.
"I wonder what the world would say if this got out."
Rolf’s eyes flew wide.
"Y-you’re going to make this public?"
"Yes. I’m planning to tip off the Wall Street Times."
"Why!?"
"Because it’s the truth."
Thanks to the Thomas Motors fiasco, both David Lockhart and Trish O'Connor had gained tremendous fame.
What would happen if an article exposing the truth behind Cooloud went up while the fallout from that incident was still raging?
No matter how hard the two of them tried, they’d never be able to stop it.
Alex spoke up.
"Do you really think that kind of threat will work?"
I leaned back in my chair.
"Threat? Not at all. This is a fair proposal."
"Do you think I’d accept it?"
"You don’t really have a place to say that. If Cooloud goes under like this, wouldn’t your standing in the family become unstable?"
"..."
Alex’s face hardened.
Unlike his brothers, who invested in stocks, bonds, commodities, and the like, he had poured every cent of his inheritance into Cooloud.
He had even taken more money from the family group and put that in as well.
If he lost all of it, he would fall out of the succession race. Who would entrust the management of the group to a failed investor?
"I’ll give you three days. Think carefully about it."
Having said my piece, I stood up and left.
After Han Miru and David left, the room fell into silence.
Now that they were alone, Alex snapped, "Damn it! Is what they said true? Say something!"
Rolf shouted back, "What do you want me to do about it!?"
"Did you really steal it?"
"What did I steal?"
"Then what?"
"Jason was dead! The program didn’t have an owner anymore, did it? I just used it!"
"..."
That was usually called theft, wasn’t it?
Rolf kept spewing excuses.
"Mimir was garbage at first! It evolved when it met me! Without me, Mimir would’ve been nothing!"
No matter how plausible a twisted argument he piled up, it didn’t change the basic fact that he had stolen it.
Alex, at a loss for words, said, "At the very least, you should have told me!"
"I didn’t know it would turn out like this!"
"Why didn’t you say anything sooner?"
"And if I had? You think you would’ve teamed up with me then?"
"..."
He had agreed to work with Rolf because Rolf was the developer of Minerva—no, Mimir. If the rights could be purchased separately, there would have been no need to partner with him at all.
Alex barked, "Damn it! You call that an excuse?"
"I’m telling you, I didn’t know it would come to this! Jason said he’d never shown the program to anyone. Not even his wife! Mimir was something only he and I knew about!"
"And now those guys know too!"
"I don’t know either! I don’t know!"
Part of me wanted to grab him by the collar and punch him in the face. The fact that Alex wasn’t doing that yet meant he was exercising every ounce of restraint he had left.
Rolf Buchi had been a genius, an innovator, and a star who represented Silicon Valley.
But all of it was a lie.
No, worse than that—he was a fraud who stole a dead friend’s program and presented it as his own!
Rolf probably thought he had hidden it well all this time, but Alex, working beside him, had noticed enough to suspect something.
Still, he had never dug too deeply into the problem.
At the very least, he had assumed Rolf had participated in making it. If several people had developed it together, how could anyone prove who contributed what?
If he had taken part in the creation even a little, he could still claim usage rights. Even if a legal dispute arose, he had believed they could defend themselves.
But if he had simply stolen the entire program from a dead friend, that was a different story entirely.
Just from the materials the other side had shown them, they would lose in court without question. No, before a judgment even came down, the public would be slamming them and their clients would start turning away.
If I’d known sooner, I would’ve bought it for a million dollars, ten million dollars, whatever it took.
As long as they had secured the rights properly, it wouldn’t have mattered who originally developed it. But now those rights had passed to Continue Capital.
Rolf buried his face in his hands.
"If this gets out, I’m finished."
When the Thomas Motors scandal broke, Alex had laughed at the founder who’d pulled off the scam—and at the investors foolish enough to fall for it. His own brother had been among them.
But if he wasn’t careful, he was about to become exactly that kind of fool. No, because he had bet everything on Cooloud, the damage would be far worse.
Alex ground his teeth and said, "If it were only you who was ruined, that’d be a relief. Now I’m about to be ruined too."
David shook his head.
"I still don’t understand."
"What don’t you understand?"
"Why didn’t Rolf Buchi just buy the program? He could have done what we did and met with the wife to purchase the rights."
It was common enough to buy another person’s technology and build a business on it.
Even Bill Gates, the founder of NS, hadn’t developed NS-DOS, the company’s early operating system himself. He’d simply brought in a developer and bought the program.
And yet all the enormous profits and fame had gone to Bill Gates.
Who in the world would remember the name of the developer who made NS-DOS, even if they knew Bill Gates?
So why hadn’t Rolf bought the program?
Because he wanted it for free? Because he was stingy with the money?
"Have you seen the movie Ripley, by any chance?"
"I saw it a while ago."
The protagonist, Ripley, admires his friend Ricky so much that he kills him and takes his place.
That’s where the term "Ripley syndrome" came from.
It isn’t a real mental disorder, but it refers to deceiving others so you can become closer to the person you want to be.
Rolf had always wanted to be the one singular genius everyone looked at in awe. But his ability never quite reached that level.
He probably hadn’t started out intending to steal. He’d likely only meant to attach himself to the project as a joint developer. But after Jason died, he changed his mind.
He hid the truth and announced that he had developed it himself.
David shook his head.
"What an absurd story."
"Well, everyone wants something different."
If he had only cared about money, he wouldn’t have done something this stupid. But what he wanted was the image of a genius and the praise of the masses.
And he had enjoyed it long enough.
David gave a bitter smile.
"Alex Preston is the one I feel sorry for."
Anyone could start a company with a good idea.
But for a small startup to grow into a giant enterprise, it needed capital at the right time.
Even with Mimir and Sid Lucas, Cooloud wouldn’t have grown nearly as fast if Alex hadn’t supplied the money when he did.
Of course, the reason he had poured so much money into it was that he was certain it would succeed. And in the first life, he had reaped the reward to match.
But this time, because of me, things had changed a little.
Rolf would be paying for his own mistake, but Alex had done nothing wrong. He had simply chosen the wrong partner.
I didn’t have any particular feelings toward him, either.
But...
"There’s no such thing as good or evil when it comes to money."