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I doubt they converted it all in USD. Maybe they invested in other crypto, and maybe somewhere between $257m and $1b might be their bank acct balance. Imagine having at least $250,000,000 and as much to hire employees! Of course they can keep 5 employees and pay "managers" xx $millions a year...no law against that, "that's how they decided their company should be run"

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That would piss off many investors and you don't want to do that. The most recent example is Martin Shkreli [1].

What they could get away with is spend 20-50% of the funds on hiring a large well-looking diverse team, spend the rest on consultancy fees from world-class experts in XXX and YYY and eventually quietly shut down. In the current investment climate this won't be taken as a questionable spending, at least not enough to bother investigating possible affiliation between you and the experts (e.g. Juicero and Ottolock).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

How is that different from embezzlement?

Because in that situation you're just paying with their own money for employees for their work. Usually, in a normal company, you will have a board of directors or ombudsman or somebody with some kind of incentive to prevent massive overpaying that essentially becomes a gift(unless, of course, we're talking about the CEO, then pay away until the cows come home) - I don't know, does FileCoin or the parent company have that kind of set up?

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