The millionaires who missed out

 MAURICE and Dick McDonald, the brothers whose name has become a $110 billion global fast food giant, never wanted more than a handful of restaurants.

It was Ray Kroc, the hard-nosed milkshake-maker salesman, who took their idea and brought it to the masses, kicking them out in the process.

“I think he’s kind of an asshole,” said Robert Seigel, the writer of The Founder, a new biographical drama starring Michael Keaton as Kroc.

Had the McDonald brothers stayed on, they would have died with considerably more cash than the $US2.7 million Kroc bought them out for in 1961.

And they weren’t the only ones. Hindsight is 20/20, but history is littered with cases of people who got out at just the wrong time — missing out on millions in the process.

For former E! News host Ali Fedotowsky, who began her TV career as a contestant in the 2009 season of The Bachelor, it could have all played out very differently.

Facebook, where she worked in sales, had given her an ultimatum. She had run out of leave days, so she could either leave the show and return to work, or quit.

Unsure if she would make it to the final stretch with pilot Jake Pavelka, she bid him a tearful goodbye. “I don’t know if I made the right choice! It’s so hard,” the then 25-year-old cried in the limo. “What did I do? How could I have left him?”

The following year, however, ABC offered to make her the star of The Bachelorette. Choosing a career in TV over tech, she left in March 2010 after less than a year with the company — leaving her stock options behind.

The stock options later made many Facebook employees millionaires, with the average value of equity at $US4.9 million.

While her engagement to Bachelorette contestant Roberto Martinez ended in 2011, she scored a few TV hosting gigs and today runs the AliLuvs blog.