[michaelochurch]

No horse in this race, but I assume parent is actually implying a third possibility, where the email exchange is real but cherry-picked by parties friendly to Spiegel.

Right. Or, it's "real" insofar as it actually happened. His stated interest in building a quality business and being careful with "OPM" is obviously not genuine, but the conversation actually happened and, at the time, he would not have known that the Sony leak would happen in the future. He didn't write that particular email with the intention of it being leaked.

After the leak, Spiegel needed to lend credibility to the idea that he's not some careless frat boy and he (or, just as likely, his PR team) decided to focus attention on a particular email. Since the email itself was poorly crafted, an influential third party was paid off (bought social proof) to say that it was "very impressive" for his age.