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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

That's not how any of this works. If you steal money from the cash register to bet it all on black in Vegas, you're still going to jail even if you happen to hit and be able to return what you took.

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That is, coincidentally, how we still have FedEx.

Fred Smith taking the company's last $5K to Vegas and luckily winning $27,000.

Mind you at that point, pilots were putting fuel on their personal credit cards, payroll had been bouncing for weeks.

(Funnily, some people here think he did the right thing.)

That’s the story he likes to tell and it’s repeated uncritically often enough, but I find it stupendously unlikely to be reality that he converted 5k into 27k playing blackjack of all games. And that that one week was enough to see him through to close 11m at an unspecified future date after having burned 80m getting the company up and running.

I chalk it up more to myth building and would love to see a reporter that dug into that story to know what actually happened.

It's survivor bias. It seems unlikely, but we know FedEx to be a successful company to some reasonable level at this point in time. It stands to reason at some point in the past the company was very close to collapse. If it had collapsed we would never have heard about it.

Why does that in any way tell us anything about the veracity of a vague story with no details? I don’t doubt they were in trouble, just that I doubt that he gambles the last 5k and the extra runway of 1 week somehow got them through to 11M at a later unspecified date. What did they do between that 1 week and the 11M raise? It’s not like they became profitable suddenly and it takes a while to raise 11M and it doesn’t sound like they were just waiting for 1 week for all the wires to come through.

Do you actually believe if paychecks were bouncing, pilots would be paying for fuel with their own money? Myths are kind of cool sometimes but let's stay within the boundaries of reality. I'm sure the blackjack story is highly exaggerated, probably also the story that his professor gave his business plan a failing grade.

> That is, coincidentally, how we still have FedEx. Fred Smith taking the company's last $5K to Vegas and luckily winning $27,000.

The difference is it was the companies money - not FedEx customers.

> That's not how any of this works. If you steal money from the cash register to bet it all on black in Vegas, you're still going to jail.

But, if the investments hadn't hadn't gone bad and FTX hadn't run out of money, it's probable that no one would have known that he had stolen/borrowed customer money. The same probably goes for Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos and Nick Leeson/Barings Bank - its only when things go wrong that misdeeds are found.

> its only when things go wrong that misdeeds are found

Counterpoint: Shkreli.

Well if you observe me just for the moment I have on hand 1B, my net worth is 1B and JP Morgan will be willing to lend me 10B.

Worst comes to worst tax payer bails again the banks out.

Why do you think the tax payer taking a gigantic loss is a good thing?

I'd prefer that the government fund food for children rather than confidence men/women

We did it for Elon and Twitter. So why not for SBF?

Yeah but what if you return 119% of what you took?

> what if you return 119% of what you took?

You go to jail. It’s not a hypothetical.

You can go to jail for stealing "nothing." Two Illinois cases I'm thinking of:

https://casetext.com/case/people-v-kotlarz

https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/people-v-haissig-2110726-88540...

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