Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged, bailed and confined to his parents’ home in the Silicon Valley-adjacent suburb of Palo Alto, pending trial for fraud and other crimes related to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced on November to 11 years for wire fraud related to the collapse of Theranos, and some day soon — perhaps after she gives birth to her second child — will be jailed.
The familiarity of these frauds contrasts sharply with our understanding of how both would-be entrepreneurs leveraged and misused ethics and their youth to fleece friends and strangers, and — when they got caught — to mitigate the legal and social backlash.
As Holmes’ story makes clear, “doing good” is now part of the to-do list of any ambitious millennial. Not “doing good” instead of making one’s fortune, but racking up billions by doing good. Or at least using a fortune made through conventional means to help others, as Bankman-Fried claimed he was doing as an “effective altruist”.
If this reminds you of how the superwoman was built in the 1990s, you’re not alone. By adding “working, too” to the already unrealistic expectations of good womanhood, paid work became an additional cross for women to bear rather than a trigger for a sorely needed restructuring of how we raise kids. For Holmes, the sincere desire of her employees and investors to do good was not a trigger to realign her personal or corporate values and behaviours, but was just another admirable human emotion she could exploit.
It’s tempting to let the youthfulness of Bankman-Fried and Holmes lead to empathy and forgiveness. I mean, who hasn’t messed up in their 20s? From the repetitive schoolboy contrition of the T-shirt-wearing Bankman-Fried, to Holmes’ proffering of her youth as an excuse in courts, both have adhered to what feels like a PR script designed to ape moral accountability and regret. The acceptance that they “screwed up”. The expression of “devastation” at the harm caused and a determination to do everything that can be done to “do what’s right”.
But this is the problem with liars. You can’t trust a word that they say. And even if you could, this shouldn’t earn them forgiveness, or any mitigation of the legal and social consequences coming their way.
Indeed, people who are truly sorry often welcome such punishments as means by which they can pay something back to their victims and society for the harm they caused. Perhaps in the hope, justified in my view, that once they’ve actually paid their debt to society — not just mouthed some words — we owe them another chance.
Perhaps this is how we’ll feel about Bankman-Fried and Holmes if they ever stop miming moral contrition and actually do the hard work of paying their debts.
