And FYI, while he died unexpectedly young, a 57-year-old man in the US has only a 50% chance of living to see their child reach 23 years of age. I, personally, wouldn't feel comfortable risking leaving a child with a likelihood of dealing with my death at that relatively young age.
Perhaps a clearer way to put it: a 57-year-old man in the US has a 50% chance of living to 80, which doesn't seem quite as shocking of a statement.
To me it seems more like he wanted to have a child with his wife before he passed so they planned it out so it would happen.
Obituaries mention surviving family members by convention, but otherwise leave very personal matters to the family.
The death of someone can be a reminder of our own mortality. Maybe a later HN post can work through some of those thoughts.
It's not like he gave himself cancer on purpose and chose to leave a child with nothing out of spite. He played the hand he was dealt, it seems.
"Mitnick has filed a 13G form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosing ownership of 9,379,829 shares of KnowBe4, Inc. Class A (KNBE). This represents 6.9 percent ownership of the company. "
" companies announced on Wednesday that they have entered into a definitive agreement, with KnowBe4 stockholders set to receive $24.90 per share in cash, "
"Vista Equity Partners to Acquire Security Awareness Training Firm KnowBe4 for $4.6B"
https://fintel.io/news/mitnick-kevin-discloses-stake-in-knbe...
https://www.securityweek.com/vista-equity-partners-acquire-s...
The poster above mentioned that Mitnick had more than 9 million shares of some company sold for ~25 dollars each. That would be ~225 million.
Companies and the government can spy on people all they want (see Snowden) but the reverse is punished severely (see Assange)
The man didn't hang himself, he got a case of severe bad luck. I'm sure he'd be here doing the father figure stuff if he could, but if he can't, that doesn't mean the kid shouldn't have been created, and really, that's their family's own personal decision to make.
Ultimately, he did a good job for his family and the kid will be fine.
People shitting on him on the day he died for choosing to have a kid that he leaves very well taken care of just seems wrong in several different ways.
I mean, we could all be at work trying to provide for our theoretical kids right now and we're sitting here saying dumb shit on the internet instead.
And Warren Buffet will tell you that you want to give your kids enough money so that they can do anything, not so much that they can do nothing. Have you spent time around kids who know they will be millionaires when they grow up? Really messes with your head. A buddy of mine was supported by his parents as an expat in a resort city and ended up brutally murdering his dad after they clashed about money.
And FWIW, I will be able to give my kid enough money to do anything, have been carefully developing his mental and physical aspects, travel abroad, language immersion, etc. So your attack is inaccurate in my case.
It's virtually always impossible for almost everyone to be able to simultaneously 1] have kids while you're still young 2] wait until you have "enough" money.
Warren Buffet's quote doesn't make sense, because both "anything" and "nothing" are relative. You can "do nothing" with extraordinarily little money. You can also not be able to do "anything" even with billions of dollars (start an asteroid mining company?).
If you give your kids the moon, you just have to make sure they still have motivation and character, it's still possible. Not everyone who inherits money is a layabout.
I can stop now though, I think we just fundamentally have different opinions on this and probably won't budge much.
I think what's going on here is that some people (myself included) find it extraordinarily offensive to question someone's right to procreate, whether they're "good enough" by some metric to have done so. Are you young enough, rich enough, smart enough, tall enough, moral enough, etc.
Of course, the offense can be a combination of being offended on behalf (of Mitnick in this case), and also projecting (what if we lived in a world where people questioned whether I should have children for reasons of age, wealth ... or worse reasons.)
I think we live in a world where we need all kinds of people from all kinds of parents; when we start to pick at who "should" have children, we risk losing something.