Exactly. Municipal regulators were unprepared for somebody with a billion dollars willfully breaking laws. And the laws were not a huge deal. For financial regulators, it's their bread and butter, and the laws are most definitely a big deal. Money laundering is a problem they are very serious about because it enables so much other crime.

I'm sure Facebook would not be dumb enough to step in front of that train, but if they did, it would run them flat.

There's also a sort of 9/11 effect going on here. The reason the 9/11 hijackers pulled it off was that nobody expected them to use the planes as giant suicide bombs. Previous hijackings generally ended peacefully, so everybody just stayed chill. But that window of opportunity expired before they managed to crash the 4th plane. Now nobody's just going to sit quietly through a hijacking.

Similarly, I think the reason Uber and Airbnb got away with so much lawbreaking is that it was novel to have nominally respectable companies blatantly committing a wide variety of crimes. But these days, tech companies get a lot of suspicion. Regulators are not interesting in getting caught flat-footed again. And that was true 5 years ago; SF vigorously shut down a bunch of entrepreneurs that wanted to sell public parking spaces back to the public: https://www.govtech.com/transportation/SF-Demands-MonkeyPark...