To be fair, people poured millions of dollars into a drunken pirate investment company (pirateat40). "I'm going to take your money and drink it away, har har" was somehow better than the alternatives, which often involve basically-impossible-to-circumvent paperwork requirements(buying stock without a phone/mailing address, say), obtrusive spy-on-your-customer policies, risk of having your wealth appropriated by governments like the government of Venezuela and so on.