Just because we've grown accustomed to decades of golden parachutes and widening income inequality and excessive equity based compensation to dodge taxes at the high end doesn't mean any of this is normal or victimless. The victims are everyone who isn't an executive.
Not in my book. They got a few years of a cushy job and now move on to something else.
Otherwise this sounds like calling the people who were evicted for not paying their mortgages “victims”. Sure they lost their homes, but they also got to live in the house for a while for free.
Tankies couldn’t have written a better indictment.
Take Theranos for example. That whole thing is a huge case is scientific illiteracy. What they were suggesting was essentially impossible to achieve, yet people invested in it anyway. Nobody demanded to even see it working properly as a prototype. There are enormous kickstarter campaigns for things like "self-filling water bottles" or "solar roadways" and people fall for them.
Quite a few people did and recognized the fraud that it was long before it was public. But there were quite a few vested interests in making sure the price the equity would sell at was more than what they purchased at.