found the article quite weak, hurt by the East Coast media’s tendency to make everything about government & Trump.

> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.

I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.

Does asking for downpayments on vehicles you will never ship count?

If so then you you have one more example now.

It’s a movie review so they didn’t actually go in deep on the fraud.

FTX, Terra-Luna, Nikola (as mentioned), Builder.ai, Frank, Kalder, Joonko

O and have you heard about the AI labs and how they calculate ARR? lol.

Statistically significant though? I do not know.

Agreed. Even the non-governmental example in the article - Nikola Corporation - was uncovered as a fraud more than six years ago. And the governmental examples as described aren't even fraud, they're corruption.

Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.

Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.

A good argument could be made that precisely because it happens in government and those people aren’t booted out post-haste, then society is apparently a lot more OK with this style of behavior than before.

I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?

And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.

I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.

This is the point though. Trump's approval ratings prove his base does not give a single flying fuck about his grift and corruption. They admire it.

Now you've got a third of the country who are just totally ok with fraud if its perpetrated by someone on their team.

Nearly all tech billionaires are on their team.