Make money? Doubtful, doubtful.

The "alpha version" was panned.

You may be hitting a cultural difference here, Seth. Remember that in the U.S., making money isn't a sin (British prejudice on my part, sincere apologies).

Wales's main problem isn't greed. It is lack of a decent product. If he gets any money from such an IPO, then the old American phrase "there's a sucker born every minute" applies. Much.

I don't think the main problem is even lacking the decent product, or even making money from free work of others (which would have been a big problem for me if I was in his position), his problem is that he lacks technical understanding on how to solve the problem (or even approach it correctly), and evidently he does not want to pay for it - you can't expect top search people to work for free to make him rich, not because there are probably no suckers among those people, but because all those people are already employed working for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.