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Comment by swedish_mafia | Hacker News Reader

This is a travesty.

He is sentenced not for drug prices but for this: he started a hedge fund which lost money, used some of the funds to start a pharma co, the pharma co did well went public and he returned the investors their money at a huge profit for them.

Who sufffered? No one.

But he misrepresented his funds performance and did not inform them of the pharma co investment.

This man is an entrepreneur.

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His new investors made $10 million less than they would have if he had not stolen from them. Embezzlement is still a crime even if you are the CEO and the company is profitable. And there was a bunch of lying in securities disclosures of course, which is a crime by itself.

This man is not an entrepreneur, and to try and say so is to insult and demean actual entrepreneurs everywhere.

His investors got lucky that he had the funds to repay them due to his other company. Had he gotten away with this, he likely would have done it again, and those investors might not have been so lucky.

You can talk after you take a biotech company public.

no, we can talk about the fact that using fraud to fund legitimate activity isn't entrepreneurship, now.

You don’t get to define the word. He started a company which is now public and worth close to a billion dollars.

No, I can talk now, based on the fact that I have not defrauded investors.

So he lied in order to start the company in the first place and managed to exploit the lie into a profit.

This is still fraud. The fact that it paid off isn't relevant to the fact that it's fraud.

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