What loathing? Finance serves an important purpose.
But its purpose is NOT to police self-dealing. And the people putting the money in are exactly the people who are directly responsible for governance.
Likewise, due to regulatory capture, the people who put money into businesses are closely related to the people who write laws about what is or isn’t legal, and enforce those laws.
So if Adam’s choices are ok with his investors, they are going to be structured in such a way that they are perfectly legal.
The bottom line:
If Adam provides an opportunity for his investors to make their “ten billion,” why would anyone object to his self-dealing?
Why do we, for that matter?
What crime is being committed, if everything is disclosed? What puritanical streak runs through us that we object to his leasing his own buildings back to his business on moral grounds?
Either he follows through and makes his investors rich, or he doesn’t. I have opinions about that, but at the end of the day, that is all that matters to his financiers, which is why he so-called “got away with it.”
And the things that were unwound were only unwound because they impacted the likelihood of his investors making money. It had nothing to do with crimes being committed or moral turpitude.
What you mistake for loathing is actually me putting money in black and white. Money is neutral. It’s not good, it’s not evil. What people do or don’t do to make it is good or evil. What people do with it is good or evil.
Leasing your trademarks to an entity you own? That’s just shuffling money around. It’s not evil and not a crime. It may affect somebody’s calculations about whether they want to buy a stock, but that’s exactly what the S-1 is for.