Slashdot Mirror
Facebook CEO Accused of Securities Fraud
Precision noted that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned 26 last week, and gets to celebrate by being accused of securities fraud. This goes back to the old Facebook legend that Zuckerberg stole code from other Harvard students.
"You and 54,972 others like this."
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
The fin on top of your head doesn't do what you think it does.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Those who desire to steal securities in order to gain freedom will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
He may or may not be guilty of anything
I've never actually done any research into the guy, but from all the stories up here I can pretty much tell he's a douche.
which is totally what she said
I bet he will regret the 'Poke' feature if he does time
I gotta say, I'm not all that surprised...think about it, you're just an average college student, and not a few years later you're a billionaire. That's gonna fuck with your ego, no matter who you are.
Living With a Nerd
Oh to be so burdened.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
How we humans love to tear down success. It's in our social nature. So it's perhaps ironic that Facebook, the top predator in the land of social acceleration, is having a bad week and we are all enjoying the schadenfreude.
That observed, one can realize there are good reasons to hate face book, and overblown ones. Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms, faster than the older generations are comfortable with. This could be good in some cases, but there's also can be excellent reasons why traditions became traditions. For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me. Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing. Also people are mean.
My hope is that as the bad reasons get debunked we don't lose sight of the good reasons for hating facebook.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Especially when you make that money by screwing other people over in the first place (allegedly).
BTW - I'm not a huge fan of the fact that the summary refers to the allegations as "legend." That strongly implies that it never happened... And there's decent indication that it may have.
I am not a securities lawyer, but the SEC 1934 Act allows private civil suits regarding securities fraud. This act has been amended and reformed and affected by case law, but you can get the basic gist of modern requirements for civil securities fraud lawsuites here.
The securities don't have to be publicly traded. You don't have to sit around and wait for the SEC to investigate. If somebody made material misrepresentations in connection with the sale of securities, that's enough to meet the basic threshold of being subject to this law and open to civil suits. Then there are just a series of bars to get over regarding showing that the person knowingly caused you to lose money and had the intention of screwing you.
These things are expensive to litigate, so the stakes have to be high. Your average $250k angel investment gone wrong isn't going to be something you bring to court. A class action representing thousands of shareholders who each lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a publicly traded company, however, has enough money at stake to see this sort of lawsuit fairly frequently.
This case is only unusual in that most parties to large private investments on this scale (tens of millions of dollars) are private equity firms or venture capital funds and they generally can do their own due diligence on transactions in the tens of millions of dollars and can afford to write off the expected percentage of complete losses and partial losses. In this case, the suing party took securities that may have been misrepresented as settlement for a lawsuit, and presumably didn't have the resources on hand to conduct their own due diligence.
So I can't say for certain whether a judge will allow this case - are securities offered as part of a settlement being "offered for purchase or sale"? You'd have to ask a lawyer to tell you whether that is technically the case, but if they accepted the securities in lieu of cash, there might be a case for that.
But just because you don't hear about this kind of case terribly frequently doesn't mean it's total bullshit or that the author is flaming or an idiot.
He was not yet a billionaire when he called the Facebook users "dumb fucks". That's right, he was 19, long before those billions would have hit his ego too hard, and already calling the users of his service dumb fucks.
Once that sinks in, I think we can conclude that he has been a douche all along.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The measure of a man is what he does with power" - Plato. As true 2000 years ago as it is today.
Good-bye
We are not a predatorial, combative species. We're more like the Bonobos (pygmy chimps) than chimps. They screw each other silly at the drop of a hat to smooth over social tensions. The traits you describe are a consequence of developing agriculture and a surplus, and then experiencing famine. Instead of moving on to more fertile grounds, we stayed until the surplus was exhausted, then used our newly developed societal organization to wage war on our neighbors. This resulted in a whole generation of brain damaged children (starvation does that) being raised by a whole generation of PTSD damaged (war does that) adults. Our selfish side was locked in culturally.
This is why you don't see walled cities before a certain point in history. No weapons exclusive to killing other humans as opposed to hunting, either. No mass graves, not until the time period when the Sahara dried up.
Science has shown that your view of human nature is fundamentally incorrect. Please see my post above yours for citations. It is human nature to be more concerned about fairness and reciprocity than self interest. But the opposite view excuses all sorts of unfair and non-reciprocal behaviors, and so it is still immensely popular with a certain set of privileged people, despite the evidence against it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton