Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nemo44x

A lawyer would be a negative towards the defense he’s already playing which is the “idiot defense”. [1]

If he acquired representation it would make him appear to:

1) be aware that he did something wrong

2) make his idiotic statements unreliable going forward as a lawyer would filter his statements

3) give the prosecution enough to work with to break his idiot defense.

This is all part of his plan to evade accountability and prison time.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_defense

View on HN

It's a negative because no lawyer would agree to such a dumb strategy.

I'm doubtful it's a coherent pre-planned legal strategy though. Playing dumb isn't a legal defense. Considering his obsession with "altruistic" charity, it makes sense he'd take an altruistic approach to the media backlash... Something detached from a purely rational/economic approach that places communicating his own good intentions as the most important metric.

Then why is he doing all these idiotic things? He’s either an idiot (which I don’t believe) or it’s an act.

He hasn’t said anything egregious but considering he is fully aware he lost $5B and knows he had a positive public image he would like to maintain, I’d bet he cares as much about how he appears in public as much or more than he cares about not going to jail.

Ego is occams razor

There is no a good legal strategy here by talking like this no matter how you spin it. He just desperately wants to come off as a hapless good guy who got in over his head, even if it makes prosecution easier.

I’m not buying the brilliant conman narrative until I see more evidence he actually profited from this more than some $16M house for his already upper-middle class family.

Oh I don’t think it’s a brilliant strategy but rather one of desperation.

I do like the idea he just thinks he can good-guy himself out of it.

Yeah I don't remember a case of someone doing the awk-shucks routine as dedicate as SBF in the recent history of major financial scandals.

Maybe that's what got him money in the first place? A disarming pseduo-honesty.

I think he got high on his own supply (both literally and figuratively). He was being praised and lauded by all of the most powerful people in the world for years. People were throwing billions of dollars at him and telling him he was a genius who could do no wrong. Add in the fact that he is clearly a narcissist and sociopath of the highest order and you get SBF.

What if he is an idiot? You know... like a certain russian leader.

This is probably the right answer. It also helps if he is, to some extent, an Idiot. It's even possible that he genuinely feels bad.

It’s fairly immaterial to the fact he defrauded American investors and he should be prosecuted.

Commenting because genuinely curious - i thought FTX international was the org where people were defrauded but FTX.us was a “separate entity” where customers could be made whole tomorrow.

It seems convenient that the customers in US jurisdiction magically are precisely the customers who weren't (supposedly) defrauded.

In my opinion it sounds like it is too difficult to start a proper exchange. After all if countries and their financial regulatory were cooperative only a fraction of funds would have been lost because the Bahamas company would be just a holding company.

And his parents can be defacto acting as his lawyers anyway.

When’s the last time they argued a case in court?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com