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Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

justice.gov

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Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#221

Post by philwelch »

ludocode wrote: post #140
Phillip98798 wrote: post #68

Well, I'll be losing sleep hoping Netflix can make it through this tough time. Seriously, is there one person alive who believes the guy should get seven years in prison? Fire him, do your character assassination thing, but prison time? Why are our tax dollars being used to defend a multi-billion dollar corporation? Let Netflix run its own company. Change compensation structure or something to reduce corruption. Douc…

I absolutely believe he should go to prison. If a fine is the only punishment for a crime, then that law only exists for the lower classes. The only way to punish a rich person and deter other rich people from crime is to take away their freedom.

This isn't necessarily true in the general case, let alone in this specific case.

In the general case, some countries calculate fines according to the criminal's income for this very reason.

In this specific case, fines or, in the case of a civil lawsuit, damages in excess of the amount of money the person illegitimately gained would be sufficient.

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#222

Post by hammock »

tptacek wrote: post #43

The DOJ press release is clearer than this article is: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv... Some fun details: Kail did his criming through a shell LLC he set up called "Unix Mercenary". He took between 10-15% of the total billings for each of the companies he hooked up with this scheme. None of those companies were charged (more's the pity). They got him on mail fraud, wire fraud, honest se…

How did Netflix find out about the scheme?

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#223

Post by Oddskar »

ugwigr wrote: post #197
jacquesm wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did just that.

in the comment? how many people would read his comment versus the subject line? Also the fact that he can fundamentally change what a user posts and then choose whether or not to disclose it in comment section is a flaw.

How astute of you to observe that HN does not always hold your hand.

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#225

Post by NikolaeVarius »

ugwigr wrote: post #197
jacquesm wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did just that.

in the comment? how many people would read his comment versus the subject line? Also the fact that he can fundamentally change what a user posts and then choose whether or not to disclose it in comment section is a flaw.

How dare we expect people to read

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#226

Post by philwelch »

bogwog wrote: post #204
Phillip98798 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there better targets to make a point with though? Military contractors, oil companies? We're talking about billions of dollars in bribes. Do you think this case will even put a dent in that corruption? This is not a lot of money and as the popularity of this thread insinuates, this is how things have always been. There is no Silicon Valley without these types of deals unfortunately.

Imagine if it was only a fine: say, 90% of all your money/assets. That sounds like a crazy gamble, but people gamble money all the time. Lots of people would be willing to take that risk. But prison time scares everybody. You can't get those years back, no matter how wealthy you are.

Judging by how many people end up there, prison time does not seem to be a particularly effective deterrent either.

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#227

Post by s1artibartfast »

ugwigr wrote: post #201
pacoWebConsult wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waiting for the dang smackdown reply to this comment. You posted a secondary source (typically these get redirected to the primary source for any story), and used the editorialized title from the original journalist as your post title. Pretty commonplace on HN to correct these things so we can discuss the facts, not the reductive analysis of what someone writes about the primary source.

as I suggested, admins should feel free to delete my post and even ban me from posting - but fundamentally changing what I posted is wrong.

A redirected tag would be transparent and address both concerns

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#228

Post by 1cvmask »

We met him at tech conference in SV almost a decade ago.

He passed on our info of saas pass to a "competitor" onelogin (which got acquired recently). Turns out they were already using onelogin. No idea if he had shares in onelogin at the time.

Seprately there was a Google Apps (later rebranded to G Suite and now Google Workspace) conference at Fort Mason around 2013 or 2014ish. At that event a Google employee Clay Bavor said they have an internal saying for product rollouts and new features. It was WWMKD. What would Mike Kail do?

I guess don't do what Mike Kail would do.

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#229

Post by hammock »

hintymad wrote: post #165
tptacek wrote: post #43

The DOJ press release is clearer than this article is: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv... Some fun details: Kail did his criming through a shell LLC he set up called "Unix Mercenary". He took between 10-15% of the total billings for each of the companies he hooked up with this scheme. None of those companies were charged (more's the pity). They got him on mail fraud, wire fraud, honest se…

That's amazing. Kail was a star in Netflix. He got promoted to VP only a few months after he joined Netflix as a director. I don't get what the point is of committing such crimes.

What was he promoted for?

Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors

#230

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

handrous wrote: post #96
numbsafari wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. Long ago, before Dotcom went Dotbomb, I worked for a firm where the CIO was being paid kickbacks by our hardware reseller. He was terminated for other reasons and, shortly after he left, our head of network ops got a call from the distributor asking where they should s…

> The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. I think it's because a lot of "hustle" culture and stories of the early business careers of very successful founders involve a bunch of stuff that sure looks like fraud or otherwise like something that ought to be illegal (it may not be, but I mean that it feels like…

Heh, yea. Good observation.

This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change.

Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.

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