No. They literally sold pieces of their businesses for that money.
The equivalent for students would be if instead of borrowing the money, they signed over a percentage of all future earnings for the rest of their lives.
There's no effective difference. Only the terms are different. Although if your student loan debt is large enough, you may in fact be signing over a percentage of all future earnings for the rest of your life. One of the biggest growing groups of student loan debtors is senior citizens.
Both a loan and VC funding are legal relationships between someone who lacks money and someone who has money. It's a trade of current money for future money. Of course it's always a risk, because the future money may never show up: the debtor defaults, or the startup goes out of business. Plenty of startups die for reasons that have nothing to do with bank failure.
(Note also that a loan holder cannot simply repossess the money if the loan is in default. The disbursed money is no longer theirs. At worst, the loan holder can sue to have the debtor's wages garnished by a certain %, maximum 15% for federal student loans.)
That's an argument to bail out every failing business. Why this one in particular? Why not every one?
> In the case of students, they borrowed money that was not theirs, spent it and don’t want to have to repay it.
This is a very one-sided description, making it sound like the students stole the money. There are two sides to every loan, the borrower and the lender. The lender in question here was the US government itself. The government lent the money to people who could not afford the loans and who had no collateral for the loans. In other words, without regard for the ability to repay. If a bank did this, the bank would go out of business. But then by your own argument, there ought to be bailout. ;-)
> essentially punishing those who did repay their debts
How so?
> the many, many more who didn’t go to college
Forgivness of student loans is not a punishment to these people. The punishment was the high college costs and society's requirement that job seeker have college degrees. Both debtors and non-debtors are punished by this situation; they just suffer the punishment in different ways.
> encourage lenders to be a bit more judicious
You're missing the part where the lender is the government. These are direct government loans, which is why the government has the power to forgive them. The government cannot forgive private loans.