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Shawn didn't take the Shinns up on their offer. As eTantrum slowly evolved, even attracting acquisition interest from CMGI, the computer-security job offers were “falling out of the sky,” Scott said, with hourly pay that could add up to $12,000 a week. The Shinns returned to anti-hacking work. Like the good geeks they were, instead of pulling the plug on eTantrum, they open-sourced the software and allowed others to adopt it.

Given what John Fanning had, which was 70 percent of Napster Inc., and what he thought he had, which was control of a company worth far more than what he was being offered, one can understand why he declined overtures from Grosfeld and Lilienthal, Newlin, and the Shinns. The harder thing to comprehend is why eighteen-year-old Shawn would turn down an offer from technically superior teams that would have netted him “a million dollars and a monster truck,” as he laughingly described it later with a hacker inside joke: That’s the nonnegotiable fee that hacking collective Cult of the Dead Cow demanded for handing over an advance version of its powerful Trojan-horse attack program, Back Orifice 2000.

It wasn't clear that Shawn himself understood why he had done so. “One, I didn't take them that seriously. Two, I didn't really know much about starting a business, and even at this stage we weren't really thinking about it. Three, my uncle was family. So I didn't. I mean, it could have been that I was just so out of it from working on the code that I didn't even want to think about it, even though those are kind of crazy numbers. But most of that period of time was a blur, and I just went for what felt comfortable and what felt right, and none of those felt right—the idea of taking a bunch of money and moving somewhere, even though I'd never seen close to that amount of money. . . . I can't even think of the thought process that I went through when stuff like that happened,” Shawn said. “I wonder what would have happened if we had done that. I don't know. There are just too many variables.”

JOHN FANNING CONTINUED his ceaseless quest for money on his terms, turning for help to his neighbor and adviser, former sneaker marketing executive Tom Carmody. And one of Carmody’s connections seemed like