Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged, bailed and confined to his parents’ home in the Silicon Valley-adjacent suburb of Palo Alto, pending trial for fraud and other crimes related to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced on November to 11 years for wire fraud related to the collapse of Theranos, and some day soon — perhaps after she gives birth to her second child — will be jailed.
The familiarity of these frauds contrasts sharply with our understanding of how both would-be entrepreneurs leveraged and misused ethics and their youth to fleece friends and strangers, and — when they got caught — to mitigate the legal and social backlash.
As Holmes’ story makes clear, “doing good” is now part of the to-do list of any ambitious millennial. Not “doing good” instead of making one’s fortune, but racking up billions by doing good. Or at least using a fortune made through conventional means to help others, as Bankman-Fried claimed he was doing as an “effective altruist”.
If this reminds you of how the superwoman was built in the 1990s, you’re not alone. By adding “working, too” to the already unrealistic expectations of good womanhood, paid work became an additional cross for women to bear rather than a trigger for a sorely needed restructuring of how we raise kids. For Holmes, the sincere desire of her employees and investors to do good was not a trigger to realign her personal or corporate values and behaviours, but was just another admirable human emotion she could exploit.
It’s tempting to let the youthfulness of Bankman-Fried and Holmes lead to empathy and forgiveness. I mean, who hasn’t messed up in their 20s? From the repetitive schoolboy contrition of the T-shirt-wearing Bankman-Fried, to Holmes’ proffering of her youth as an excuse in courts, both have adhered to what feels like a PR script designed to ape moral accountability and regret. The acceptance that they “screwed up”. The expression of “devastation” at the harm caused and a determination to do everything that can be done to “do what’s right”.
But this is the problem with liars. You can’t trust a word that they say. And even if you could, this shouldn’t earn them forgiveness, or any mitigation of the legal and social consequences coming their way.
Indeed, people who are truly sorry often welcome such punishments as means by which they can pay something back to their victims and society for the harm they caused. Perhaps in the hope, justified in my view, that once they’ve actually paid their debt to society — not just mouthed some words — we owe them another chance.
Perhaps this is how we’ll feel about Bankman-Fried and Holmes if they ever stop miming moral contrition and actually do the hard work of paying their debts.
Hmm. I do not long for the greed is good days. I reckon if we had put the entire boards of Goldman-Sachs and their ilk (along with the ratings firms like Moody’s and Fitch) in the slammer we’d see less of these new age frauds. In the ruin of lives that cane from the GFC none of the perpetrators were punished and most got promoted. In the wake of the scandals of our own finance indistry which involved fraud, theft, money laundering, possible aiding of terrorism and gross malpractice, the worst punishment was a few resignations.
Cannold is not in any way defending ‘greed is good’ beyond saying it is a more honest expression or statement of intent than the declarations of altruism and service to the public good, and the ridiculous apologies for the consequences of their actions, that spray from the likes of Bankman-Fried and Holmes.
The irony of the ‘greed is good’ slogan is that it became part of the 80’s culture from its use in the film ‘Wall Street’. This was intended by writer and director Oliver Stone as an excoriating attack on the newly unleashed neoliberal capitalism and the monstrous behaviour of those exploiting it, but instead Gordon Gecko and his ‘greed is good’ speech were widely celebrated.
Well said. Their rote apologies are nauseating. Somehow I am reminded of a young man who was found guilty of murdering his parents. Asked by the judge if he had anything to say before sentencing, he replied, “You must be merciful to me, remember I am an orphan”.
I can’t help thinking that these fraudsters are actually performing an unrecognised Darwinian service to society………
…..anyone who believed their arrant bollocks quite obviously deserved to have their money taken from them.
Conversely, what lessons were learned by those who had their losses in the Pyramid Building Society in Victoria reimbursed by the government?
Simply that if you were gullible enough to believe that any company that could charge 5% for mortgages and pay 10% for deposits was a going concern, then Big Brother would make it all better…………
………..so the obvious lesson was never learned.
Why does virtually everyone fail to realise that the 0.01% are enemies of the people, to a man, by definition?
This isn’t hard. A billionaire’s wealth can’t be earned, ipso facto, they’ve denied a fortune to thousands.
This is before you even begin to look at how they behave, which on the whole, seems more or less bent on denying us representation in government so they can become even more stupidly rich.
Anyone that believed the fairy tale stories that induced them to “invest” in these shysters should take some responsibility for their losses.
To a point, but improved regulation would have helped.
It’s worth keeping in mind that “effective altruist” is a term of art for a very specific Silicon Valley delusion where, amongst other things, you think that a future omnipotent Artificial Intelligence is going to punish you (or possibly, a reconstructed digital version of you) if you don’t do what is in its best interests before it even exists.