Comment by refulgentis

I went from a college dropout waiter to small town successful startup founder to Google, and Google somewhere between 3-5x'd my comp. I left, after 7 years, due to some nasty stuff.

It's hard to explain and I don't understand fully myself, yet, but there's a point where more money isn't worth some sort of principle you have, and it's a lot lower than I would have thought.*

In their case, I'd imagine having the unencumbered ability to talk (i.e. not needing to worry if HP would come crying if he got a job at Apple and did an interview for Fortune someday) would be worth more than whatever a severance package was on top of years and years of 6-7 figure comp.

This would be especially paramount if you felt current management was completely misguided on decisions you were involved, they were doing the standard corpo forceout maneuver, and you couldn't say anything yet because the #1 qualification for CXO jobs is a history of placing nice / dumb when needed.

* reminder to self: this is also probably the purest answer to my Noogler fascination with how high turnover was, given the company approximated paradise to my eye at that time