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Comment by hnews_account_1 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a year older than him and in finance without an Ivy League education or any pedigree and I can swear to you that innocence act fools no one except people outside the field. This is like a programmer saying he drowned the company because he didn’t realize how much he was spending on cloud costs as he left the auto scaler on. It is the stupidest excuse, except the autoscaler was running on infra the programmer created and owned so he just took all the money. Which is just basic fraud.

It is such basic fraud that it happened even in 2008 and it’ll keep happening. Cherub faced little fucks will evolve to fool you out of your money until the end of all time. Don’t fall for it.

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I think the thing that confuses a lot of people is that if he's actually savvy, why on earth has he agreed to do so many damaging interviews? He's either (a) naive in at least some respects, (b) actually doesn't care about his legal liability - what he told the NYT today, or (c) is playing some sort of long game where he parlays his apparent innocence into a shorter prison sentence. But I think a lot of savvy people don't see (c) working out for him.

Because he thinks, that he can get away with it, thanks to political donations.

After all unlike Holmes and Madoff he didn't steal from the rich.

Huh? A ton of rich people got burned by this. Probably way more than Madoff or Holmes ever dealt with.

> why on earth has he agreed to do so many damaging interviews

It seems to be working, at least on some margins. Even here he has his defenders.

I think the interviews are a misstep. He’s taking too much meth to think clearly even though he was once obviously a very smart person. The insistence on innocence reminds me of a small child shouting indignantly that they didn’t do anything even if you catch them absolutely red handed. They also totally believe it in the moment and refashion their world view and their truths around that statement.

An adult - in general - will recognize when the jig is up and take it on the chin. Or just lawyer up if they think they can get away with it despite being culpable. This is a 30 year old who thinks he knows better than his lawyers (assuming his lawyer didn’t actually advise him to go to interviews and claim he did it against their advice for some reason). I’ve yet to meet a 30 year old that stupid. It’s the gradient between 25 and 30. You understand the world so fast that a 25 year old seems like a child if they insist they’ll go at it without lawyers.

> I can swear to you that innocence act fools no one except people outside the field.

Full agree. But when I see this, I assume his target market is the single juror at his criminal trial who needs to buy it in order to prevent a conviction.

Edit: Unless it's a Bahamas jury trial (for a crime not punishable by death), in which case, he will need to convince four out of nine jurors to prevent a conviction.

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