Do the math on how many seed and A rounds that could have been funded with what he burned. That certainly gets me mad, all those entrepreneurs who didn't get a shot.
I think it's important not to confuse that with the wealth that was merely transferred from one book entry to another.
The spectacular destruction of the abstract entity ensures that the slow bleeding doesn't go on.
Like, if I have $1B, which is really just a note in a computer and you steal it from me by hacking that computer, or playing a confidence game, that's not the same as if a billion dollar factory burns down.
I honestly don't follow this logic. What is the essential difference?
When hopes and dreams die, the cost or benefit depends entirely on how it motivates humans, which is very complex and often unpredictable, but can as easily be good as bad, even if it's painful.
Perhaps I am talking to a being from another dimension, or a ghost who exists only on the internet, in which case I'm probably wasting electrons.
How about this:
Suppose you have a lottery ticket, and you think you've won $1M. But then you notice that you read a number wrong, and it's actually worthless. You may feel like you've lost $1M, but actually you just gained something extremely valuable - if you continued thinking you'd won, you might have done something destructive like quit your job before you found out you didn't. And that action in the real world, would have had negative consequences for you, your employer, your loved ones, and so on. Society in other words. For some reason, even (or maybe particularly) people who think money is evil fall into the trap of thinking it's real as...(google says "a donut").