I don't think there's any way to reasonable describe a life sentence as lenient, unless one was facing the death penalty.

It's pretty lenient in Canada. Child rapist murderers can apply for day parole in ten years (where yes, they let them scuttle off into society unattended) and permeant parole in 25 years. Families are continually retraumatized every few years in that system by having to beg parole boards to not let out the freak that stalked, kidnapped, raped, killed and dismembered their daughter or mother. They never get to move on.

Oh wow, people are allowed to apply for parole and become productive members of society again, how terrible. Can't possibly be allowed.

It wasn't about being paroled but the disparity in leniency.

Uhh, read it again, definitely was.

Again?

Propotional to the size of Madoff's ponzi, SBFs sentence is heavy.

Both Madoff and SBF redlined the 2B1.1 "monetary amount of fraud" criteria, so the comparison is moot.

Yeah, I think the guidelines are correct to think about all staggeringly large amounts of money in the same way. If you steal $600 million, you probably would have stolen $10 billion if you could.

Again, Madoff plead guilty. Has SBF shown any (real) remorse or taken responsibility?

Nope. And the sentencing includes several instances of SBF lying to the court. Judges don't like being lied to.

Madoff lost $20B in cash. SBF lost $8B in cash.

Wasn't Madoff's plan the whole time to pocket investor money for himself, whereas Sam's was to arrogantly (and illegally) gamble it with the thought being he could return the principal from Alameda back to FTX in future? Genuine question, I'm not super informed on these.

Sam paid and loaned to himself $2.2B (and another $1B to top execs) out of the $8B that was lost. That doesn't include the Bahamas real estate; trabuccos yacht; celebrity endorsements; stadium naming; or the private planes to deliver amazon packages to the bahamas.

The idea that Sam was just a risky investor is the story Sam wants to tell. But he already told that story in court, and it was rejected.. because the evidence doesn't support it.

No, SBF did directly steal from FTX users. He used an intermediary (Alameda) to do so. The end result is the same: he stole from customers to enrich himself, his family and his friends.

I'm sure both SBF and Madoff originally thought they would be able to make enough money to cover up the theft.

From what I read Madoff didn't seem to, he never actually tried to invest the money and couldn't really have expected his ponzi scheme to become a permanent engine of the economy or anything..

I don't really think that has the moral conclusion people try to imply though. Thinking they could get away with it as a permanent secret gap that no one need ever know about is actually a worse moral character.

You can't believe how people can think intent matters?

There's no difference in intent described there. Sam's plan was to pocket investor money for himself (and maybe return some of it, eventually, if his gamble paid off)

I'm pretty sure Madoff returned some money before being found out, too.

From what I’ve read, it’s not exactly clear that Madoff had a plan, it seems more like he lied to a few people about being able to make them a lot of money, and that snowballed into him taking a lot of “investments” that he didn’t know what to do with.

From what I’ve seen about SBF, it does seem like he has a very high risk tolerance, was betting big to win big, and thinking the reward was worth the risk.

Yea, ponzi schemes start by accident. It requires no planning

Funnily enough if SBF hadn't been found out the investments probably would have recovered enough to cover the deposits and he'd still be a hero.

Tether, Terra, Circle, crypto lending

Heck it's almost like this describes crypto itself

In the short term, sure, but SBF liked to make big risks and it seems inevitable that he would have been on the losing side of a bet that he'd made with money that was supposed to be safer than a treasury bond.

Madoff was supposedly on the level for some 25-31 years. He started business as a broker-dealer and money manager in 1960. Madoff claimed that he started just putting fund contributions in a personal account in 1991, but prosecutors think he was at it sometime in the 1980s, maybe since Black Monday in 1987?