Interesting. If you had taken a good materials engineer with you, run the analysis, and then shorted PCG using an analysis of when this would fail, you would have done very very well indeed.

I wonder how predictable this is in a materials science sense. And to top it off, you could have immediately outed PCG through it anonymously shortly after the fires really spread.

All perfectly legal.

A more ethical way (considering the human cost) would have been to out them early and then forced maintenance on them but I don't know if that would have been as profitable.

I suspect there are lots of these opportunities around. I wonder how you find them. Hmm.