[YetAnotherNick]

Asked AI:

- Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX): Sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for orchestrating a massive fraud involving the misappropriation of billions in customer funds.

- Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos): Began an 11-year prison sentence in 2023 after being convicted of defrauding investors with false claims about her blood-testing technology.

- Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (Theranos): The former president of Theranos was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison for his role in the same fraud as Elizabeth Holmes.

- Trevor Milton (Nikola Corporation): Convicted of securities and wire fraud, he was sentenced to four years in prison in 2023.

- Ippei Mizuhara: The former translator for MLB star Shohei Ohtani was charged in April 2024 with bank fraud for illegally transferring millions from the athlete's account.

- Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin: Convicted in February 2025 for a $577 million cryptocurrency fraud scheme.

- Bernard Madoff: Sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. He died in prison in 2021.

- Jeffrey Skilling (Enron): The former CEO of Enron was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2006 for fraud and conspiracy. His sentence was later reduced, and he was released in 2019.

- Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco International): The former CEO served over six years in prison after being convicted in 2005 for looting millions from the company.

- Bernard "Bernie" Ebbers (WorldCom): Sentenced to 25 years in prison for orchestrating an $11 billion accounting fraud. He was granted early release in 2019 and died shortly after.

Apart from this list I know Nissan's ex CEO was put into solitary confinement for months.

[nobody9999]

Who went to prison from Union Carbide for the Bhopal disaster[0]?

Who went to prison from Exxon for the Valdez oil spill[1], or from BP for the Deep Water Horizon[2] debacle?

Who went to prison from Norfolk-Southern for the East Palestine train derailment[3]?

Who went to prison from Boeing for the 737Max debacle[4]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine%2C_Ohio%2C_trai...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

[maxbond]

Notice that everything on GP's list is fraud (except Gohn of Nissan who was accused of embezzlement and failure to report income). It's very difficult for an executive to go to prison any other way.

[nobody9999]

>Notice that everything on GP's list is fraud (except Gohn of Nissan who was accused of embezzlement and failure to report income). It's very difficult for an executive to go to prison any other way.

I did notice. Which is why my list included mass deaths and massive pollution/ecological destruction, some of which we still don't know what the eventual damage/death toll will be.

And that's the bigger issue: property crimes are considered more serious than mass murder and poisoning our world. Just as with the fraudsters, the corporate veil should have been pierced for the murderers and despoilers of our environment, with harsh prison sentences for those whose avarice and sociopathy allowed them to murder and despoil.

Civil liability is fine, and the "corporate death penalty" (revoking charters, barring directors/managers from future employment, etc.) should be invoked with extreme prejudice in those circumstances as well.

But we don't do that. Because corporations are, in the above circumstance, not "people", but a legal fiction protecting its owners from liability. But when it benefits the corporation and its owners/managers, a corporation is a "person."

I'd say we should work it the other way -- if a corporation is responsible for deaths and despoilation, all the owners should have a share in the punishment.

That way, after a few thousand wealthy individual investors and the owners of a few dozen hedge funds/investment houses are put in SuperMax for a decade or two for the misdeeds of the companies in which they've invested. And let's not make the boards of directors, C-Suite and any others directly involved feel left out either. They can commiserate with their fellow scumbags in the prison yard.

That does sound pretty harsh doesn't it? Perhaps too harsh? I don't think so. Because as we're constantly reminded, business responds strongly to incentives.

And if businesses are strongly incentivized to not poison our citizens, kill airplane passengers and destroy our environment with the threat of long prison sentences and a stripping of their assets, I'd expect they'd respond to such incentives.

But, as it is now, when the incentives are to privatize profit and hold harmless those who kill us, make us sick and destroy our environment, those are the incentives to which corporations will respond.

[maxbond]

To be clear "notice" wasn't really directed at you specifically, more commenters in general. I'm sorry for wording that confusingly, originally I'd replied to GP with a similar comment to yours but your comment was more comprehensive than mine so I deleted it and replied as a sort of footnote.

I'm not really big on incarceration but I broadly agree.

[nobody9999]

>To be clear "notice" wasn't really directed at you specifically, more commenters in general. I'm sorry for wording that confusingly, originally I'd replied to GP with a similar comment to yours but your comment was more comprehensive than mine so I deleted it and replied as a sort of footnote.

I wasn't confused. I was on exactly the same page as you.

You comment just prompted me to respond with my own thoughts.

It's all good.

>I'm not really big on incarceration but I broadly agree.

I'm not generally huge on it either (I think we over-incarcerate in the US), but as I mentioned, having strong incentives is important to guide corporate behavior. Besides, if an individual (and especially a poor one) caused a train derailment or dumped battery acid in the drinking water causing sickness or death, or sabotaged a plane so that it crashed, you bet your ass they'd be incarcerated.

Why shouldn't we have the same standards for corporations and the wealthy?

[myrmidon]

I do agree with you that corporate accountability is often quite poor, but I think the notion that every serious incident should conclude with someone going to prison is simply wrong.

Overly punitive handling of accidents does not lead to better safety-- it primarily leads to people playing the blame game, obfuscating and stonewalling investigations.

This is extremely likely to make the overall situation worse instead of better.

I also think punishment based on outcome is ethically extremely iffy. If you do sloppy work handling dangerous chemicals, your punishment should be for that, and completely independent of factors outside your control that lead to (or prevent) an actual accident.

[nobody9999]

>I do agree with you that corporate accountability is often quite poor, but I think the notion that every serious incident should conclude with someone going to prison is simply wrong.

If someone puts a shopping cart filled with lead-acid batteries on the train tracks causing a derailment and toxic chemicals spill all over the area, poisoning and endangering the people nearby, the person responsible should not go to prison?

Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

By that logic, if I beat you over the head with a tire iron, I should just walk away. Possibly paying an inconsequential fine?

What's that? The individuals involved in poisoning hundreds/thousands or killing hundreds of airline passengers or beating you to death should be prosecuted and made accountable for their actions?

If that's the case, why should folks who knowingly take steps that create the same results not be treated exactly the same way? Because they were "just following orders" from management? Because their only responsibility is to maximize shareholder value?

Having a limited liability corporation is a privilege, not a right. As such, whether it be knowingly risking the lives and/or environments of others or making the cost/benefit analysis that paying fines/settlements will cost less than operating safely and putting others at risk is acceptable is behavior that should not be acceptable in a civilized society.

As I mentioned in another comment, businesses are strongly motivated by the incentives in their marketplace. If we make knowingly and/or negligently putting others at risk of harm both a death sentence for the corporation and criminal liability for those responsible (which includes management, the board and shareholders), we create the appropriate incentives for corporations to do the right thing.

As it stands now, willful, knowing negligence will usually only result in fines/lawsuits that are a pittance and not much of a drag on earnings. Those are not the right incentives.

[myrmidon]

> Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

If the risk is not excessive, my answer would be no. If the behavior is only realistically punishable when it actually results in an accident, then the answer would also be no.

I think that neither air travel nor chemical plants pose an excessively elevated risk to human lives right now, thus increasing punishments for infractions would be disproportionate, nto very helpful and potentially even detrimental for safety long-term.

Your analogy (beating someone with a tire iron) also clearly features intent; this is not typical for accidents and makes punishments less justifiable and much less useful.

If you actually want to make a strong case for increasing (shareholder) liability, it needs to be clear that those additional punishments and enforcement overhead would actually save lifes, and that very critical point is absolutely not obviouis to me right now.

[nobody9999]

> Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

The above was poorly worded. My apologies. Instead: if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, and that airliner crashes, killing hundreds, they should not be imprisoned?

As for the rest, you are ignoring the modifiers "knowingly" and "making the cost/benefit analysis that paying fines/settlements will cost less than operating safely" and "knowingly and/or negligently putting others at risk of harm" and "willful, knowing negligence"

Why are you ignoring those qualifiers? Did you just miss them? Were they not placed prominently enough in my prose?

I'm not (and I explicitly said so) talking about accidents that are the result of bad luck or a relatively unforeseeable chain of events.

As I repeatedly said, I'm talking about willful, knowledgeable negligence and/or cutting corners knowing safety could be compromised and making conscious decisions to accept known risks of harm to people, property and/or the environment in pursuit of increased profit.

But you knew that, because I repeatedly said so. As such, why are you arguing with a strawman you set up rather than engaging with my actual statements?

A great example of what I'm talking about is the continued sale of HIV contaminated blood products by multiple pharmaceutical companies who knew their products were contaminated with HIV[0], were already selling products that were uncontaminated, but knowingly sold the contaminated products and thousands of hemophiliacs died slow, painful deaths from AIDS (including my brother in-law).

And (for the eighth or ninth time) that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Those pharmaceutical companies intentionally murdered thousands by knowingly selling contaminated blood products to people who needed those products to live -- even though they had uncontaminated products in inventory. They just wanted to make more money by infecting ~80% of US hemophiliacs and many more around the world.

Perhaps you'll claim it was just "poor process" or "deficient training" or something else equally ridiculous. But it wasn't any of those things. The pharma companies admitted doing so.

How many executives went to prison, or the companies had their charters revoked? Zero. That's the problem. That's the kind of behavior that literally screams for prison time and the corporate death penalty.

Do I need to provide eight or nine more examples before you'll stop being deliberately obtuse? You're being an apologist for sociopathic, murderous scum. For shame!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...

[YetAnotherNick]

Not sure why you rebutting my post or why it is getting downvoted. I just answered the question that asked of list of 5 people who went to jail for corporate crime. I never commented they go to jail every time they deserve(or even most of the time for that matter).

[maxbond]

People generally downvote large blocks of generated text. Perhaps it wasn't your intention to argue for a particular position, but given the context, it's the natural inference. So some downvotes may be because they disagree with the position you appear to be arguing for.

If you want to neutrally answer a rhetorical question in the context of a debate, you're going to have to disclaim that somehow. Otherwise, there's no way for us to know, and the comment walks and talks like an argument.

[YetAnotherNick]

The argument was whether executives go to jail and the answer is yes and I believe people in HN wrongly think executives are overpreviliged/immune in this case, that's why I bothered to comment. The argument above my thread was never if they "always" go to jail. I would even say normal people don't always go to jail when they deserve.

[maxbond]

Then I'm confused why you would express surprise at receiving pushback if your intention was to enter a contentious debate? But you do you.

[nobody9999]

>Not sure why you rebutting my post or why it is getting downvoted. I just answered the question that asked of list of 5 people who went to jail for corporate crime. I never commented they go to jail every time they deserve(or even most of the time for that matter).

It wasn't a rebuttal of your comment so much as I saw it as an opportunity to show the double standard in play WRT the consequences of ripping off wealthy folks vs. destroying the environment and/or outright maiming and killing people.

I didn't downvote your post either. Although if I'd noted that you "Asked AI", I might well have done so. To be clear, that's not a jab at you personally. Rather, I come to HN to discuss stuff with the other users, not read LLM generated text. If that's what I wanted, I don't need to come here, do I?

Sadly there's more and more of that here, with many folks not even saying they used an LLM (I use that term because "AI" doesn't actually exist) to generate their comment. I appreciate that you did so. Thanks!

[YetAnotherNick]

First of all, it was one of the rare instance where LLM(with search) is applicable as this involves summarizing top search results. Secondly I never paste any line from AI without verifying each of the line.

[riku_iki]

> Asked AI: > - Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX): Sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for orchestrating a massive fraud involving the misappropriation of billions in customer funds.

> - Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos): Began an 11-year prison sentence in 2023 after being convicted of defrauding investors with false claims about her blood-testing technology.

many from your list went to jail because they robbed rich, and not poor.