I&#x27;m pretty sure a few tens of millions (lets say Nolen has 5% equity? I think give or take a few points, that&#x27;s about right) for 4 years (generally the buy-out terms for a pair of golden-handcuffs) and the freedom to choose the direction in which TS goes (notice I did say &quot;Lead&quot; -- his role would have to be essentially Anders or Meijer&#x27;s level for it to go through I&#x27;m sure) would be equally amenable for all parties involved. (I don&#x27;t think you understand the freedom engineers at that level in MS get, especially post-Ballmer). Immutability sucks in TS? Oh well, here David, take 5-10 SDEs and do whatever you want.<p>MS gets the Clojure (and maybe more importantly the CLJS userbase), Cognitect gets massive reach (CLJS is subsidized solely by the licensing of Datomic by strict revenue), MS&#x27; corporate customers get Datomic. Just going by the direction MS has been in lately (&quot;embrace &amp; extend&quot;) under the new anti-Ballmer role, floating an offer of 300-500 million would be beneficial to everyone involved. Let&#x27;s say there are conservatively 100k Clj(s) users out there right now using Clojure + Sun&#x27;s JVM. At 300 million that&#x27;s 3k per active developer acquired right off the bat. You&#x27;ll lose maybe 10% of the users who live-by-their-Macbook-and-die-by-their-iPhone. Even at 600 million, that&#x27;s still a cheap price to pay.