I would not be surprised if it made him more sympathetic to a “young kid” at this point in his life. That sort of thing is soul crushing.
I've never particularly liked SBF even before he imploded, but I don't want him spending the rest of his life in jail for a non-violent crime. I'd rather see him banned from finance and banking and sentenced to a million or so hours of teaching programming and computer science to underserved poor children, or something similarly constructive. He has these amazing skills that could be put work benefitting society, and instead we lock him away so the prison-industrial complex can profit. Such a waste, let's rethink that.
EDIT: Looks like he graduated MIT with a physics degree, so I'd hope so. Then again, maybe we don't want con men teaching kids.
But compared to, say, Jeff Dean, his skills are garbage, tofu-dreg, and devoid of any real craftsmanshift or integrity. Pick your point on the continuum.
But I'd rather have high-skilled conmen like Sam, Michael Milken, etc. answering for their crimes and rehabilitating by helping others and being constructive, than wasting away in jail, and potentially teaching other criminals there, or becoming more criminal themselves.
My guess is they'd exploit the situation for their own gain, even if only subconsciously. SBF was the face of Effective Altruism for a time.
Perhaps they can clean trash off highways or work soup kitchens.
Financial crime at this scale absolutely causes people to die unless you think several billion dollars worth of resources is ineffective at keeping people alive.
The people who engage in fraud at this scale create far more human misery than your average mugger, though I think both should be adequately punished.
There are real mental and physical impact to loss of majority of your wealth, which can lead to homelessness, exhaustion from working more to cover shortfalls, marital strife, abuse, suicide.
Considering this wasn’t just insiders like high net worth investors angel investing, but everyday people, yeah it hurts a lot of people in real ways. Probably a lot more than the Madoff crowd for example.
This is even discussed in the film version of The Big Short.
Not convinced. I lost about $50k to mortgage shennanigans and about $800 to being mugged. Guess which one gives me nightmares years down the line.
Perhaps 800$ fraud on Amazon/Ebay is a more appropriate example.
But as Stalin said, quantity has a quality all its own. When you steal large amounts of money like SBF did it’s different, but that doesn’t make it better.