“ All Coinbase personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.”
/s
I think we'd all like to imagine a world where company's are run like sea faring ships- the captain gets paid the most to be accountable for the whole operation, and when things go wrong must be the last one off the ship. To the point where any selfish behavior by the captain in an emergency can be criminal. (This is just an analogy, not saying the CEO should actually risk life and limb.)
But in reality they are run a lot more like Project Runway. The contestants pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their garments and over the course of the season, and eventually the best of them receives a spread in Vogue and something like a $500,000 contract and some other goodies. The real winner though is always Heidi, who collects her $20M fee regardless of who gets the show's nominal prizes and is awarded an Emmy for executive producing.
* People understandably put a very high value on their life continuing, and really don't want to trade it against other things.
* People vary a lot in how much value they put on their job continuing, and how much they are willing to trade off against it.
For example, many people would consider taking a 2x raise even if it increased their chances of losing their job in the next 3y from 5% to 50%, but you're not going to find many takers for a 50% chance of death in the next 3y no matter what you're offering.
You can have a culture where jobs are treated as sacrosanct as lives, who are nearly so. In a culture like that companies would be extremely cautious about hiring in a way that would make workers overall worse off, and startups with be much less practical. Europe is farther in this direction than the US, though not all the way to what I think you are proposing with your analogy.
"White collar crime" generally has vastly broader effects than what we normally think of when we talk about crime; it's just harder to see because the effects are not as immediate or obvious. Livelihoods destroyed by layoffs to juice the stock price; land, water, and air poisoned by pollutants released because paying the fine is cheaper than actually cleaning them up; people dying because they can no longer afford the insulin they need to live after the price was raised absurd amounts purely to increase profits...
Just because the CEOs aren't physically on a ship where everyone's lives depend on making good decisions in times of crisis doesn't mean they aren't responsible for incalculable pain, suffering, misery, and death.
If someone really over leveraged themselves so much, at some point you can’t blame their employer.
So he's heaping all of the blame on the terminated employees?