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Comment by Zombieball | Hacker News Reader

If I was a CIO of a large company, I would not spend 4 months in jail just to gain $500k extra. Not worth it.

He cashed out $1 million in shares not knowing if these shares would become near worthless shortly after selling them. Considering it was a $175k fine, he eliminated serious risk to his personal finances.

Many rational people would do what this CIO did given this minor fine and brief prison sentence.

Maybe I am overestimating what he earned in a year. Tried a quick search to figure out what % of his take home income this was.

I am not sure at what point I would start to consider 4 months in jail for insider trading “worth it” (again this was a plea deal, could’ve been higher).

If all your personal wealth is tied up in a single company’s stock then you obviously run a risk of losing it all. The solution to that is diversifying your portfolio, not insider trading.

Their current CISO makes 3.9 million in total comp: https://www1.salary.com/Jamil-Farshchi-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Op...

His lifetime earnings will now be greatly diminished as a felon. He would likely have spent a fortune on legal fees before accepting this plea.

He made a very stupid decision and it will impact the remainder of his life.

His potential lifetime earnings were probably already suffering as a result of being a CIO who presided over a massive data breach.

He was CIO of one of the business units (Equifax U.S. Information Solutions), not the whole company. That guy (Dave Webb) resigned after the breach, and Jun Ying was going to replace him.

I doubt that. Nobody seemed to care that he really shat the bed.

America, where the legal fees hurt worse than the punishment.

Well, it’s the same for puny things. Insurance spike hurts way more than an over speeding fine.

It really depends on how precarious he thought his position was after the breach. If his career as an executive would not be significantly harmed by breach, trading 4 months in jail and 5 million+ future career earnings as an executive for a 500k payday is not something rational people do, IMHO.

"eliminated serious risk" that's textbook beancounter thinking

What's the impact of this conviction in his future earnings?

Yeah, not really worth it.

A rank-and-file engineer at Google already earns $200k to $500k.

This is a C-level at a large company. I'd say $500K isn't much.

Very dumb decision by CIO, to be honest.

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