Tell that to Jeff Skilling, Bernie Madoff, Martin Shkreli, Denis Kazlowski, Martha Stewart, Joseph Naccio, John Rita's, Sanjay Kumar, Sam Waksal, Marty Grass... the list goes on and on.
Small fish, the lot of them. We'll soon see if the law works, if it does, both Elizabeth Holmes and a Boeing executive will do time for 10 years.
What is your criteria for size of fish? Enron's market cap was $60 Billion.
Enron went down because the people they ripped off had the power to do so.
The whole of Congress gets statistically impossible returns on the stock market, but Martha Stewart got to do time over a five-figure sum obtained by information gained at a party. That's not equitable.
Martha did time for lying to law enforcement. Never lie to law enforcement! Clam up and ask for a lawyer, every time. They may act friendly, but that's just psychological manipulation, they are not your friend.
I agree. But you also have to factor in that when the insider trading went down, she was sitting on the board of directors of the NYSE. So she knew what she was doing and I'm sure that factored in to the decision to prosecute.
I mean, what do you expect congress to do — pass laws restricting their ability to do this? Because it’s not illegal today, and it’s literally the reason a lot of them got into politics in the first place. Even guys like Bernie can’t help themselves.
Holmes is a small fish too. At the end the company didn't have that much cash, and no real IP worth a damn, so there's no collateral that makes anyone powerful want to step in, or any company at all to protect anymore. Just a person who likely broke the law and a lot of those same people that could have spoken up for her pissed of because she lost their money.
Healthcare is a heavily regulated safety-critical field, and for good reason. Holmes picked the wrong field to commit fraud in. Patients or their physicians made therapeutic decisions on bogus technology, some lost money, some pay even have died. It's not about investor money, it's about public health and about a demonstration that the system works.
I'm not arguing she would have gotten away with it if there was still some assets to defend, just that when it comes to "big fish" actually being prosecuted, she doesn't really qualify because she's basically already gutted. That the industry is heavily regulated with heavy penalties might have made her a good contender to for a big fish being held to account for misconduct (in a specific industry at least), but situation is different enough it's not (and won't be) indicative of how very powerful people are held to account.
Most of those people were heading up enormous companies. Not small fish at all.
CEOs don't go to jail unless their crimes affect other CEOs.