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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

What's strange to me is that Zuck isn't the only person who works for Facebook, and Facebook isn't the only company that works in the NSAdtech market. Hopefully he's not just the ablative heat shield.

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> What's strange to me is that Zuck isn't the only person who works for Facebook

But the only person to have majority of votes (more than 60%) in the company. If Zuckerberg doesn't like the responsibility which comes along with being the majority owner of the company, he should change the structure to 1 vote per share. But he won't.

If your boss tells you to do something illegal, he could have 100% of voting shares and you would still get in trouble. If Zuckerberg's directives haven't been illegal than nobody stands to get in any trouble at all. The only case where Zuckerberg stands alone as the only person in trouble would be if he gets in trouble for lying about doing the thing instead of getting in trouble for the actual thing. That's an "ablative heat shield" solution because it may appear to the public that something has been done, while in reality the disincentive and the thing people want to stop are totally unrelated.

Why hopefully? It seems appropriate the CEO and owner takes liabilty for his company.

It’s not like he’ll face any real consequences. CEOs get easily payable fines, not prison time.

It would be unfortunate to have a Skreli situation where we just randomly take out the one with the most punchable face rather than dealing with the structural issues that have created a whole industry doing what he was doing.

Shkreli was by no measure a dominant player in anything other than the tiny niche he exploited for a short time.

Sure, he just had the most punchable face.

Shkreli messed up by continually taunting US law enforcement. He probably wouldn't have had the book thrown at him if he wasn't constantly talking about how great it was to be an evil capitalist, and instead gave the mealy-mouthed platitudes that every other CEO of pharma companies does.

Yep, he's the poster boy for "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

That's an odd definition of "random."

I think his point is that more than him should feel consequences, not just the slap on the wrist for the CEO.

Fine percentage of revenue, then. I don’t see how going after individuals would disincentivise the system unless they go after a significant percentage of the organization. Otherwise there’s no point to penalizing people at all—it’s just outrage theater.

> NSAdtech I can’t tell if this is an NSA pun or if it’s an Apple API.

Ablative meat shield?

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