this is the umpteenth example of why we need to shred the corporate veil. it doesn’t actually fuel innovation as it purports to do, but rather promotes a slippery slope of bad behavior by owners and executives (at the expense of customers, employees, and society at large). like many bad regulations, it’s a distortion of the risk profile for a given endeavor, which leads directly to negatively externalized, but rarely unintended, consequences.

all the sackler billions should be clawed back and commensurately redistributed to literally everyone else.

Yup. The good has to come with the bad. I can understand the motivation for things like limited liability, but if that is to exist then the individuals should not be able to extract billions from the corporation. We see this consistently. The rich and powerful justify something that benefits them by pointing out the downsides and then when the downsides rear their heads, the rich and powerful find a way to ignore them.

> they contributed some of the billions in previously captured profits from their family wealth to get to an agreement

Not even that. They agreed to give 4.3 billion dollars over the next 9 years. Given how much net worth they have, over that 9 years they will earn that much, or more, in interest. They're just giving up the next 9 years of growth, they'll still be multi-billionaires.