So he was asked to pay the equivalent of ~50 years' worth of illegal income? How many companies get the same treatment? Break the law, pay 50 times the amount? How many companies are asked to pay without any harm ever being proven? How many executives go to prison after a company is found guilty of anything?
"Sleazy car salesman" is not an indictment worthy of 1-3 years in prison and 50 years' worth of the profits. Not unless we apply the same for any sleazy company. Are we? Then what is the case you're trying to make?
>How many executives go to prison after a company is found guilty of anything?
There's a huge difference between sending an executive to jail for actions of subordinates (which is ludicrous, in my opinion), versus jailing the subordinates for the actual crimes, which apparently happens more than you know.
If an executive makes 10-100x what their subordinates do AND has comprehensive control over the company, why SHOULDN'T they be the one bearing legal responsibility for the company's misdeeds? Whose responsibility is it?
"Oh it was just a couple bad employees doing things that aligned with our strategic executives, how could that have happened" and then the company keeps doing the same stuff after a few shmucks go to prison? Is that good?
There's not much I know everything about so I guess everything happens more than I know... You're right and it's exactly my point: laws are for the plebes. Anyone making the argument "criminal = any punishment is fair" even for relatively small time sleazy criminals chooses to do so selectively.
Regarding the fairness of sending a CEO to jail, CEO remuneration is literally hundreds of times that of the average employee. So they are treated as disproportionately responsible for the company's success. Why not its failures? Is failure all on the one employee? Was the company built so fragile that one employee is able to lead it astray? Disproportionate benefits vs. accountability for executives is again exactly what I'm flagging here as being almost the opposite of how a regular "sleazy small time criminal" gets.
What if the decision leading to the company breaking the law came explicitly from the executives? In all the cases Big Tech was fined by the EU in the past decades no executive was punished for what were explicit business decisions. The (still mostly unpaid) fines weren't 50 years' worth of the benefit. Elon Musk actually is a "sleazy car salesman" in every sense of the words. His decisions lead to laws being broken and losses for others, but no jail time, and barely any monetary punishment.
You could argue that the fine was too high (or that there should be no fine at all, and just a prison sentence); but the way this article reads is "poor mostly-innocent mostly-law-abiding citizen just ran a little website and now was huge punished for it", and that doesn't seem entirely true.
Whether companies do or don't get prosecuted sufficiently doesn't really matter here.
"Sleazy car salesman" is not an indictment worthy of 1-3 years in prison and 50 years' worth of the profits. Not unless we apply the same for any sleazy company. Are we? Then what is the case you're trying to make?