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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

He'll pay $4.3bn in fines and likely be sentenced to probation or short home confinement instead of prison...in exchange for not being a US fugitive.

He'll step down from Binance and live the rest of his life with billions. Sounds like a good deal :)

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What billions will he wind up with?

Binance did a lot of fraud and money laundering. Clawbacks are coming. There will be no fortune when the legal system is done with him.

It's obviously just speculation but someone in his position could very easily siphon off a few million in BTC/crypto at the very least, and almost impossible to detect/trace if done well

https://www.chainalysis.com/law-enforcement/

https://www.chainalysis.com/regulators/

The second half of money laundering is you need a way to pretend to have income from a plausible source.

People will ask questions like "How do you pay for your groceries?" and "Where did you find the money to buy a $37M penthouse?" and your paper trail needs to convince people the answer isn't "With the billions of dollars I embezzled."

I understand your point but I feel like even a 10 year old could come up with 100 plausible excuses.

Many of them end with "Consultant", "Collector", or "Trader".

For whom did you consult? What collection did you sell? What trades did you make, with what starting capital?

If you can't answer those questions -- questions the tax man at least will expect you to answer, and probably other people as well -- you might as well say "I found money in the street."

Husband :)

Most of those only work at a certain scale: if you launder $500, you might be able to say some people bought your comic book collection at a garage sale and get away with it. Try that with $1M and you’re going to start getting requests for evidence of your collection, how it got to have so many high value items, etc. If you’re claiming consulting revenue, then you need clients and a justification for what kind of legal work was worth paying that kind of revenue for – make the case that your advice is worth $1k/hour and you still need to be showing a year of full time work to launder a million dollars after taxes, and it’s going to be suspicious if the invoice is just “I’m awesome, pay here” with no details about such valuable work.

Every few years there will be some story about a cartel banker getting busted and one of the things which will usually stand out is that they had a bunch of people working for them, and found some legitimate businesses which had large enough volume to hide millions of dollars in criminal activity. Setting that kind of thing up isn’t usually a one man operation.

Also, it doesn't make it easier if you're a person well-known for maybe having access to billions of stolen dollars.

> What billions will he wind up with?

You can pretty trivially check Binance's declared funds here: https://www.binance.com/en/proof-of-reserves

By my calculations they have >$6 billion in excess of customer deposits. Since he owns Binance, he principally owns those profits.

Declared does not mean real. There have always been questions about the veracity of that "proof of reserves".

https://qz.com/binance-proof-of-reserves-solvency-1849884404

Do not forget. Binance operates in a space full of scammers and fraudsters. They've already admitted to money laundering at scale. After that, the question isn't whether they are dishonest. The question is how dishonest they are. The history of other crypto exchanges suggests that the appropriate prior we should start with should be heavily waited towards Ponzi scheme.

For a purposeful human being, that is also a miserable life.

Pretty much like you cannot eat your favorite food anymore and have to settle with "the next best" (philanthropy, maybe?)

Haha, I was actually referring to being a US fugitive as the miserable life, which Zhao obviously wants to avoid.

Zhao can do new things with his billions. He can start new companies, work in new markets if he wants. If he can escape China's clutches with his money, I assume he can travel the world.

I think he's relieved that he won't get lifetime prison, and even years in prison.

Living at the top, to having no freedom must be very, very hard to stomach. I would take the deal too if I was CZ.

Giving up some "power-grab addiction" for 100% freedom (and being a billionaire still), seems very good for him.

Adam Neumann is still getting huge financing. There is always a way to keep hustling.

... for now. As interest rates stay above stupidly-low levels, he's not going to be able to pull the capital he used to.

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