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Comment by kajecounterhack | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with your take. Feels more believable that the ecosystem's combination of {forward-looking + optimism + available capital} begets grifters trying to take advantage of that necessity (vs your take: that grifting is inherently advantageous).

Typically grifting doesn't scale, or you're the one in a million Adam Neumann.

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Arguably, the fact they got caught proves it didn't scale well.

> “All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.”

The closing comment in an interview with Susan Thunder [1].

That they got caught may just reflect their lack of experience at fraud. They re, after all, under thirty.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/c/22889425/susy-thunder-headley-hac...

It could also be that they have gotten way with "smaller things" before, but now they have chewed on something just a little bit too big.

Except failed vs successful grifters, we _kind of_ know who they are because it's part of their personality. Like "successful" would be folks like Adam Neumann or Anthony Levandowski. Not sure if Trump counts -- maybe most of his wealth is inherited.

"Fake it till you make it" culture.

In any regulated industry this is also known as "fraud".

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