In 2012, an unreleased app was sold for $30 million dollars. $30,000,000! Sounds terrific, right?

Not exactly. That app was Vine.

Co-creators Dom Hofmann, Colin Kroll, and Rus Yusupov sold Vine to Twitter when it was still in beta. Vine quickly took off, with the $30 million quickly looking like a drop in the bucket.

And then, out of nowhere, Twitter killed Vine. They simply couldn't figure out what to do with it. At about the same time, TikTok started, and took over the short video landscape that Vine pioneered. TikTok is now worth $75 billion. Vine doesn't exist.

So, there are no winners here, despite the $30 million. Yusupov and Kroll quit Twitter and started the flash-in-the pan quiz app, HQ Trivia, but the two stopped seeing eye-to-eye, and that bubble quickly burst. By then, Kroll was dead from a drug overdose.

There's absolutely nothing terrific about this story.