How long ago was that, though? It sounds like it's been the last few years that he's gotten significantly wealthier. Plus, earlier on he had a lot of his money invested in the equipment/businesses that is now helping him make money.
Not trying to defend his attitude or anything, I kind of went postal on him in that one thread that's still unlocked.. fully expecting to get banned by him for it, but surprisingly he replied to part of my post, and I'm still not banned there, heh.
The thing that really gets me, is how he's got this casual elitism about how good the site itself is (due to things like unlimited attachments) but then in the next breath says how he doesn't care if it goes to shit. It's like he can't make up his mind if he really wants us on the board or not.
Req- 'Fuck you, I hate you all and letting this site go to shit is hilarious to me!'
us- 'ok, we're leaving' '
Req- 'ha! good luck finding a site as good as mine......... '
That's a good point. This was probably 3-4 years ago now. I'm not really sure what he does for a living now. He may be richer, but so what. I do believe there is some financial gain for him in the board. And I'd bet Tyen's supposed self-demotion happened after a phone call from Req. It may be minimal gain.
I have a couple of apps in the app store that I put there a very long time ago. They suck, but some people still buy them, so every couple of months I get a little $40 deposit from Apple. If someone ever emailed me complaining about them, I'd just delete it, because it wouldn't be worth it to me to open up Xcode, and have to update everything in the app which is probably outdated, etc, and then fight apple over the re-submission, just for the meager pay. Similarly, it may be that Req gets minimal pay somehow from fohguild to make it worth it not deleting, but not worth investing any amount of time in. I don't know.
Draegan obviously knows more about the financial side of running forums. With Tyen's supposed 30k unique bots, errr hits, per month, what would you expect in ad revenue? Also, are Req's financial numbers correct where he lists what it supposedly costs per month to run the forums? I wonder if it's that much, or if perhaps he's including the costs of running other things he does in there, ie, fohguild is just taking up a (big) slice of his overall monthly costs.
Also, in the "END OF LINE" thread, I think its funny that Tyen doesn't acknowledge the bots. Ever. I posted a picture of his bots on his forum, showing that almost half the users online were bots, and he completely ignored it. Also it looks like someone changed Erronius's forum name to a bot name - I don't get the joke.