Stanford University

Notice to the Reader

This document is a work of commentary, criticism, satire, and public-interest journalism. It is published for educational purposes and is protected expression under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and under Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution.

Every factual claim in this document is drawn from court records, federal agency filings, government press releases, published contracts, or on-the-record statements by the individuals themselves. Sources are cited and linked throughout, and a consolidated source list appears at the end. Where a claim is an allegation rather than an adjudicated finding, it is labeled as such. Where an individual has denied a claim, that denial is stated.

The satirical passages — the proposed course catalog, the admissions pitch, the closing remarks on college football — are clearly marked as satire and are offered as opinion and parody. They are not statements of fact and should not be read as such. No reasonable reader would conclude that Stanford University is actually accepting applications to a School of Continuing Consequences.

If you believe any factual statement here is inaccurate, write to us. We will correct the record. That is more than most of the institutions described in this document have ever offered.

I. The Question

Stanford University sits on 8,180 acres of Santa Clara Valley. It has produced Nobel laureates, cured diseases, and put people in space. It also has a placement record in federal court that no other university in the world can match.

This is not a joke about Stanford. This is a question about Stanford, and the question is simple:

If a university produces one convicted fraudster, that is a student. If it produces a dozen, across four decades, in wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, antitrust violation, and identity theft — at some point you have to stop calling it a coincidence and start calling it a curriculum.

I spent years inside this industry. I founded a cloud startup that a government contractor sued out of existence. I worked at Amazon Web Services. I have sat across the table from these men when I was twenty-two years old and hungry, and I know what they say when they think the room is friendly. The mythology says Stanford produces visionaries. The court docket says something else.

So I want to be constructive. Stanford has an alumni problem. I have a solution.

II. A Modest Proposal — The Stanford School of Continuing Consequences

SATIRE BEGINS. The following section is parody. Stanford University has not endorsed, proposed, or accredited any of it.

The premise is straightforward. Stanford's most notorious alumni fall into two categories: those who left before finishing, and those who finished and did it anyway. The first group represents an incomplete education. The second represents a completed one. Both suggest the same fix — more Stanford.

We therefore propose the Stanford School of Continuing Consequences, offering post-conviction and pre-indictment credentials to the university's most distinguished non-completers. Rolling admissions. Ankle monitors accommodated. Financial aid available, subject to forfeiture order.

Proposed Course Catalog

CHEMENG 20X — Blood Work Without the Blood. A capstone for the student who left in 2003 with the idea but not the chemistry. Prerequisite: 135 months of independent study. Lab section meets in Bryan, Texas.
MS&E 274 — Board Governance for the Consistently Candid. Students learn to inform their board of directors about a product launch by a method other than the board reading about it on Twitter.
ECON 199 — Family Finance: A Directed Reading. An independent-study seminar for students whose parents hold or held appointments at this institution. Note: this course is open to MIT graduates by special arrangement, since one of them appears to have missed the material at home.
LAW 640 — Freedom and Democracy: Compatibility Studies. Taught from the position that they are not. Enrollment capped at one.
CEE 210 — Coastal Access Law for Owners of Coastal Access. Nine years, three courts, and one denied certiorari petition, condensed into a single quarter.
APPPHYS 001 — Week Two. For the student who completed two days of a doctoral program in 1995 and has been building rockets on the strength of it ever since. Covers days three through five.
PUBPOL 5 — Building the Deportation Stack. Cross-listed with Computer Science. Field trip to a data center.
ETHICS 101R — Introduction to Not Getting Caught. The department has confirmed that this course is already implicitly offered across the entire university and requires no additional funding.

SATIRE ENDS. Everything below this line is documented fact with citations.

III. The Dropout Division

Students who did not complete their Stanford programs. Ranked by nothing. Listed by consequence.

1. Elizabeth Holmes

Chemical engineering, entered 2002. Left in 2003 at age nineteen. Founder and CEO, Theranos.

On January 3, 2022, a federal jury in San Jose convicted Holmes of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors and three counts of wire fraud, involving wire transfers exceeding $140 million. The jury acquitted her on all four patient-related counts and hung on three others. On November 18, 2022, Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced her to 135 months — eleven years and three months. She and co-defendant Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani were ordered to pay $452 million in restitution.

The company was valued at $9 billion at its peak. Its board included two former Secretaries of State. Its device did not work.

The Stanford angle: Holmes did not build Theranos in spite of Stanford. She built it out of Stanford. Her professor sat on the board. We will return to him in Section V.

2. Elon Musk

Admitted 1995 to a Stanford PhD program in materials science and applied physics. Attended approximately two days. CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; owner of X.

On September 27, 2018, the SEC charged Musk with securities fraud over a tweet claiming he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 per share. He had not. Two days later he settled. Musk paid a $20 million civil penalty. Tesla paid a separate $20 million. He agreed to step down as chairman for three years and to have Tesla-related tweets reviewed by a company attorney before posting.

He has spent the years since attempting to escape the terms he agreed to — twice — including a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2018, days after the settlement, he publicly referred to the agency as the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission."

On the personal ledger, Musk positions himself as a champion of family formation and pronatalism, warning repeatedly that civilizational collapse follows from falling birth rates. He is publicly reported to have fathered at least fourteen children with multiple partners; the exact count has never been confirmed by him and reporting varies. He has simultaneously described empathy as "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization," a statement he made in public and has not retracted. We leave the reconciliation of these positions to the reader.

The Stanford angle: Two days. The most expensive forty-eight hours in the history of higher education, and he never even bought the textbooks.

3. Sam Altman

Computer science, left 2005. CEO, OpenAI.

On November 17, 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI removed Altman as CEO. Their stated reason, in writing: he "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." The board added that it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

Five days later he was back. Roughly 700 of OpenAI's approximately 770 employees signed a letter threatening to leave for Microsoft unless the board resigned. The board resigned instead. Former board member Helen Toner later disclosed that the directors learned about the launch of ChatGPT — the most consequential product release of the decade — from Twitter, and that Altman had not told them he personally owned the OpenAI Startup Fund.

This is the governance structure that was specifically designed to keep artificial general intelligence accountable to humanity. It survived four days of pressure.

The Stanford angle: The nonprofit board built to restrain the CEO was dissolved by the CEO. That is not a failure of ethics education. That is a demonstration of it.

4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Computer science PhD candidates, placed on indefinite leave in 1998. Co-founders, Google.

On August 5, 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully maintaining monopoly power in general search services and search text advertising. On September 2, 2025, Mehta issued his remedies opinion. He declined to order divestiture of Chrome, but barred exclusive distribution contracts and required Google to share search index and user data with qualified competitors. Final judgment terms were entered December 5, 2025. Google has said it will appeal.

In a separate case, a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia found in 2025 that Google had unlawfully monopolized digital advertising technology markets.

The Stanford angle: PageRank was developed at Stanford. Stanford holds the patent and licensed it to Google. The university received Google stock in the deal and later sold it, reportedly for well over $300 million. Stanford did not merely educate the founders of an adjudicated monopolist. Stanford was an equity holder.

5. Evan Spiegel

Product design, left 2012. CEO, Snap Inc.

In 2014, Gawker published emails Spiegel had written as a Stanford undergraduate and Kappa Sigma fraternity member, containing crude and demeaning references to women. Spiegel did not dispute their authenticity. He issued a public apology, stating he was "mortified and embarrassed" and that the emails were "idiotic."

We include this not because a college student writing something stupid is a crime — it is not — but because of what happened next. Nothing. The apology was accepted, the valuation continued upward, and the episode became a footnote. That is the actual lesson of the Stanford ethics curriculum: the apology is a deliverable, and once it ships, the ticket closes.

IV. The Diploma Division

These students finished. Stanford signed off. Draw your own conclusions.

6. Peter Thiel

BA Philosophy 1989. JD, Stanford Law School, 1992. Co-founder, PayPal. Founder, Palantir. Founder, Founders Fund.

In his 2009 essay "The Education of a Libertarian," published in the Cato Institute's Cato Unbound, Thiel wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

That is a direct quotation. It is not out of context. It is the thesis of the essay. A man who builds surveillance and targeting infrastructure for governments, funds political candidates across two continents, and has stated in writing that he does not believe democracy is compatible with freedom is not a complicated figure. He told you who he is. The question is whether the institution that granted him two degrees has ever asked itself what it taught him.

Thiel also secretly financed the Hulk Hogan invasion-of-privacy litigation that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2016. He confirmed this to The New York Times and described it as "one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done." A billionaire covertly funding litigation to destroy a publication that had written about him is now an established playbook in American media. Stanford Law taught the procedure.

7. Reid Hoffman

BS Symbolic Systems, 1990. Co-founder, LinkedIn. Partner, Greylock.

In September 2019, Hoffman apologized publicly for his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, telling Axios: "by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice. For this, I am deeply regretful." He said his involvement came at the request of Joi Ito, then director of the MIT Media Lab, and that he had been told Epstein cleared MIT's vetting process. He stated his last interaction was in 2015.

On February 4, 2026, Hoffman revised that account publicly on X. He disclosed six additional meetings he had not previously acknowledged — in April, June, and July 2016, and March 2018 — listing each by date. He wrote that he was "mistaken" and committed to disclosing any further meetings he discovers.

Epstein was convicted in 2008. Every meeting listed above occurred after that conviction.

The Stanford angle: Per Axios reporting, Hoffman hosted an August 2015 dinner in Palo Alto attended by Ito, Epstein, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel. Three of the men in that room hold Stanford credentials. It was, in effect, an alumni dinner. MIT's president later apologized for accepting roughly $800,000 from Epstein-controlled foundations. Stanford has issued no comparable accounting of the Palo Alto side of that ledger.

8. Alexander Karp

JD, Stanford Law School, 1992. Co-founder and CEO, Palantir Technologies.

In April 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir a contract worth approximately $30 million to build ImmigrationOS — the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. Federal contract documents describe its functions: streamlining "selection and apprehension operations," providing "near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation," and improving "efficiency in deportation logistics." ICE stated in its justification that it had an "urgent and compelling" need and that Palantir was the "only source" capable of delivering. A prototype was due September 25, 2025.

Palantir has been a DHS contractor since 2014, across three administrations. In the fourth quarter of the most recent reporting period, the company's U.S. government revenue rose 66 percent year over year to $570 million.

Karp has described himself for years as a progressive Democrat and told the Washington Post that he has repeatedly "walked away" from contracts that targeted minorities or that he found unethical.

The Stanford angle: Two Stanford Law degrees — Thiel's and Karp's — founded the same surveillance company. Whatever Stanford Law School is teaching in its professional responsibility requirement, it is being reliably outcompeted by whatever it is teaching in the hallway.

9. Do Kwon

BS Computer Science, 2015. Co-founder and CEO, Terraform Labs.

On December 11, 2025, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer sentenced Kwon to fifteen years in federal prison. Kwon had pled guilty in August 2025 to one count of conspiring to commit commodities fraud, securities fraud, and wire fraud, and one count of wire fraud. He agreed to forfeit over $19 million. The collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna tokens in May 2022 erased approximately $40 billion in three days and triggered the cascade that took down Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and ultimately FTX.

Judge Engelmayer, in sentencing: "This was a fraud on an epic, generational scale. In the history of federal prosecutions, there are few frauds that have caused as much harm as you have, Mr. Kwon."

Kwon fled to the Balkans on a false passport and was arrested in Montenegro in March 2023. He was extradited December 31, 2024. He still faces charges in South Korea.

In 2021, responding to a user who questioned the stability of his token, Kwon posted: "Have fun staying poor."

The Stanford angle: Class of 2015. Sentenced in 2025. Ten years from commencement to fifteen years in custody. Somewhere in the Stanford alumni magazine there is a class notes section that has been very quiet about this.

10. Carlos Watson

BA Economics, 1991. Rhodes Scholar. Founder and CEO, Ozy Media. Former MSNBC anchor.

In July 2024, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Watson of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors showed that between 2018 and 2021 Watson and co-conspirators lied to investors about revenue, cash on hand, acquisition offers, and contracts — directing employees to create fake contracts with forged signatures for due diligence. In December 2024, Judge Eric Komitee sentenced him to 116 months. He was ordered to pay nearly $60 million in forfeiture and more than $36 million in restitution.

Ozy collapsed in October 2021 after The New York Times reported that COO Samir Rao had impersonated a YouTube executive on a fundraising call with Goldman Sachs.

On March 28, 2025 — hours before Watson was to surrender at FCI Lompoc — President Trump commuted his sentence. The $96 million in restitution and forfeiture was extinguished along with it. Watson has maintained his innocence and characterized the prosecution as retaliation by a competitor.

The Stanford angle: This is the most instructive entry in the entire document. Convicted at trial. Sentenced to nearly ten years. Ordered to repay $96 million. Served zero days. If you are designing a curriculum to teach that consequences are a negotiation, you could not construct a cleaner case study.

11. Vinod Khosla

MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 1980. Co-founder, Sun Microsystems. Founder, Khosla Ventures.

In 2008, Khosla purchased an 89-acre property surrounding Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay for $32.5 million. The beach had been open to the public for roughly seventy years under the prior owners, who provided restrooms and a general store. Khosla locked the gate, posted a guard, and covered the sign advertising public access.

The Surfrider Foundation sued in 2013 under the California Coastal Act. Khosla lost at trial in 2014. He lost at the First District Court of Appeal in August 2017, 3–0. The California Supreme Court denied review. On October 1, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari.

Four courts. Ten years. One beach.

The Stanford angle: Stanford GSB's stated mission is to "change lives, change organizations, change the world." One graduate spent a decade and an undisclosed fortune in litigation to change who is allowed to walk onto a beach. Mission accomplished, technically.

12. Carly Fiorina

BA Medieval History and Philosophy, 1976. Former CEO, Hewlett-Packard.

Fiorina became CEO of HP in 1999 and drove through the contested $24–25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002 over the public opposition of director Walter Hewlett, son of a co-founder. The merger produced a proxy fight, a court battle, and the elimination of thousands of jobs per quarter for more than a year. HP's stock lost roughly half its value during her tenure. The board forced her out in February 2005. HP shares rose nearly seven percent on the news.

CORRECTION TO A COMMON CLAIM: Fiorina is frequently and incorrectly blamed for HP's criminal "pretexting" scandal, in which investigators obtained the private phone records of directors and journalists. That scandal broke in 2006, under Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, after Fiorina had already been ousted. Fiorina did order the first internal leak inquiry in January 2005, as she describes in her own memoir, and the investigations continued and escalated after her departure. But the pretexting itself was not hers. We correct this because a fact sheet that gets easy things wrong cannot be trusted on hard things.

V. The Sam Bankman-Fried Question

Sam Bankman-Fried is routinely listed as a Stanford alumnus. He is not. He graduated from MIT in 2014. He is currently serving a 25-year federal sentence for the fraud that collapsed FTX.

But his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, were both Stanford Law School professors. Joseph Bankman is a tax scholar. Barbara Fried taught legal ethics and wrote extensively on moral philosophy and consequentialism. Bankman-Fried grew up on the Stanford campus, in faculty housing, surrounded by a household conversation about ethics.

This is the part that should keep the university awake. He was not deprived of ethics education. He was marinated in it. Two Stanford law professors — one of whom taught the subject formally — raised a child who went on to commit one of the largest financial frauds in American history.

So the satirical proposal in Section II has a serious edge. Sending Bankman-Fried back to Stanford to take his parents' courses would not fix anything, because the problem was never a missing lecture. The problem is that an ethics education transmitted inside a culture that materially rewards its opposite is not an ethics education. It is a vocabulary.

It teaches you what to say. It does not teach you what to do.

VI. The Faculty Problem — The Case of Channing Robertson

Everything above concerns students. This section concerns the institution, and it is the most serious material in this document.

Channing Robertson was the Ruth G. and William K. Bowes Professor in Stanford's School of Engineering and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs. He taught chemical engineering at Stanford from 1970 to 2012. He won the Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching in 2009. He helped establish Stanford's Department of Bioengineering. He was, by any measure, a distinguished member of the faculty.

He was also Elizabeth Holmes's professor. He became Theranos's first board member. He introduced her to venture capitalists. He recruited its chief scientist. He lent the company his credibility for more than a decade.

Under oath in December 2016, in Theranos Inc. v. Fuisz, Robertson testified that Theranos paid him $500,000 per year — for approximately ten hours of work per month.

Reed Kathrein, the attorney who sued Theranos on behalf of investors and deposed Robertson in May 2018, stated that from 2013 through 2017 Holmes paid Robertson more than anyone else at the company, and that as of that deposition Robertson still believed in the technology. Kathrein's assessment: Robertson's function was to supply credibility.

Consider what that arrangement actually was. A sitting Stanford professor — later emeritus — was the single most important validator of a company that a federal jury found had defrauded investors of more than $140 million. He was paid half a million dollars a year by the entity he was validating. Investors who put money into Theranos were, in substantial part, buying the reputation of Stanford University.

And here is the part that matters for anyone reading this as a policy document: there is no public record of Stanford conducting a formal review of Robertson's conflict of interest, disciplining him, or publishing an accounting of what its faculty conflict-of-interest policies permitted in this case. He returned to teach at Stanford after the collapse.

Elizabeth Holmes went to prison for eleven years and three months. Her professor, who took $500,000 a year to vouch for the machine, went back to teaching.

That is the ethics curriculum. Not what is in the syllabus. What is in the outcome.

VII. What the Record Actually Shows

Strip away the jokes and this is what the documents establish:

At least four Stanford-affiliated individuals in this document have federal criminal convictions or guilty pleas for fraud: Holmes, Kwon, Watson, and — by upbringing rather than enrollment — Bankman-Fried.
Combined adjudicated sentences before executive clemency: over 51 years.
Combined restitution and forfeiture ordered: over $567 million. A meaningful portion of it has been extinguished by presidential commutation.
One company co-founded by two Stanford Law graduates holds the primary federal contract for building immigration enforcement targeting infrastructure.
One company co-founded by two Stanford PhD candidates, on technology patented by Stanford and licensed to them, has been adjudicated an illegal monopolist in two separate federal courts.
One member of the Stanford faculty took $500,000 a year from the fraud that his own student ran, and faced no publicly documented institutional consequence.

The defense will be that Stanford is large, that it educates thousands of people who go on to do good, and that a university cannot be held responsible for what adults choose to do decades after graduation. That defense is partially correct and entirely insufficient.

Stanford is not a passive bystander to Silicon Valley. It is the supply chain. It holds equity in its students' companies. Its faculty sit on their boards. Its endowment is invested in the venture funds those students run. Its research parks are the physical infrastructure of the industry. When Stanford tells you it merely educates people who later happen to become billionaires, it is understating its own role by about four decades and several billion dollars.

VIII. What We Are Asking For

This document is not a demand that Stanford apologize. Apologies are the cheapest product Silicon Valley manufactures. These are the asks:

Publish the faculty conflict-of-interest file. Stanford should release a full accounting of what its policies permitted in the Theranos matter, and whether any review of Channing Robertson's $500,000-a-year board compensation was ever conducted.
Disclose equity positions. Stanford should annually publish its equity holdings in companies founded by current students, recent alumni, or sitting faculty, and the ethics review applied to those positions.
Make ethics a graduation requirement with teeth. Not an elective. Not a guest lecture from a founder. A required, graded, case-based sequence taught by faculty with no financial interest in the industry, using these cases.
Adopt an ecocide and corporate-accountability module. European law is moving toward criminal liability for executives whose companies commit environmental and human rights crimes. Stanford should teach the law its graduates will be prosecuted under, not just the law they will lobby against.
Stop honoring the convicted and the credibly implicated. Buildings, fellowships, and speaking invitations are institutional endorsements. Treat them that way.

IX. On the Matter of Trees

SATIRE RESUMES.

Stanford's unofficial mascot is a tree. This has always seemed to me like an unusually honest piece of branding for an institution that specializes in growing things slowly, in perfect conditions, on land it does not pay property tax on, and then acting surprised when the fruit turns out the way it does.

Trees, of course, have a natural predator.

The Stanford Axe has been the trophy of the Big Game since 1899. On November 22, 2025, in the 128th meeting, Stanford beat California 31–10 at Stanford Stadium and took the Axe back after four straight years in Berkeley. Two Cal fumbles were returned for touchdowns. The Cardinal offense produced seventy-one yards in the first half and did not score a single point of it.

So the Axe currently sits in Palo Alto, guarded by a committee, in a secret location, which is exactly the level of institutional transparency this document has come to expect.

The 129th Big Game is scheduled for November 21, 2026, in Berkeley.

We make no prediction. We simply observe that the University of California, Berkeley — a public institution, funded by taxpayers, open to the people of this state — has a long and honorable tradition of taking a blade to that particular grove. And that this year, more than most, there would be something fitting about the Axe going back across the Bay.

Go Bears. Chop responsibly.

SATIRE ENDS.

X. Sources

Every link below was verified as of publication. Primary sources — court records, DOJ press releases, federal contract documents, and on-the-record statements by the subjects — are prioritized over secondary reporting.

Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos

U.S. DOJ, Northern District of California — case summary, U.S. v. Elizabeth Holmes et al. — https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-al

U.S. DOJ — Holmes found guilty of investor fraud (Jan. 3, 2022) — https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-found-guilty-investor-fraud

U.S. DOJ — Holmes sentenced to 135 months (Nov. 18, 2022) — https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/elizabeth-holmes-sentenced-more-11-years-defrauding-theranos-investors-hundreds

NPR — Holmes sentenced to 11 years — https://www.npr.org/2022/11/18/1137606060/elizabeth-holmes-sentenced-11-years-prison

Channing Robertson / Stanford Faculty

ABC News, "The Dropout" — Robertson paid $500,000/year; Kathrein deposition — https://abcnews.com/Business/theranos-remarkable-blood-test-claims-began-unravel/story?id=61173853

Stanford School of Engineering — profile of Robertson, describing his Theranos directorship — https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/not-so-retiring-retirement-channing-robertson

Elon Musk

A&O Shearman — SEC charges and settlement, $20M each, chairman step-down — https://www.lit-wc.aoshearman.com/tesla-musk-settle-tweet-related-sec-charges

NBC News — federal judge approves $20M SEC settlement — https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/u-s-judge-approves-elon-musk-s-20-million-settlement-n920651

PBS NewsHour — Judge Liman rejects Musk bid to void settlement — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musk-ordered-to-abide-by-sec-settlement-over-2018-tweets

Fortune — Musk's two days in the Stanford PhD program (1995) — https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/why-elon-musk-dropped-out-of-stanford

Reid Hoffman on X — Feb. 4, 2026 disclosure of six additional meetings — https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/2018868269512343670

Business Insider / AOL — coverage of the revised account — https://www.aol.com/news/linkedin-billionaire-reid-hoffman-reveals-180850251.html

The Guardian — MIT apologizes for ~$800,000 in Epstein-linked donations — https://news.yahoo.com/mit-apologises-accepting-800-000-145839347.html

Alex Karp / Palantir / ICE

Axios — ICE awards Palantir $30M for ImmigrationOS — https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/05/01/palantir-deportations-ice-immigration-trump

Immigration Policy Tracking Project — contract ID 70CTD022FR0000170 and justification documents — https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-palantir-awarded-30-million-to-build-immigrationos-surveillance-platform-for-ice/

Washington Post — how Palantir shifted course on ICE deportations — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/03/palantir-immigration-ice/

Do Kwon / Terraform Labs

U.S. DOJ, SDNY — Kwon pleads guilty (Aug. 2025) — https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/do-kwon-pleads-guilty-fraud

U.S. DOJ, SDNY — Kwon sentenced to 15 years (Dec. 11, 2025) — https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/crypto-enabled-fraudster-sentenced-orchestrating-40-billion-fraud

NBC News / Reuters — "a fraud on an epic, generational scale" — https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/crypto-founder-kwon-sentenced-15-years-prison-40-billion-collapse-rcna248790

Carlos Watson / Ozy Media

NBC News — Trump commutes the 116-month sentence, March 28, 2025 — https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/trump-commutes-sentence-ozy-media-founder-carlos-watson-rcna198667

CNBC — commutation hours before surrender; forfeiture and restitution extinguished — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-commutes-sentences-of-ozy-media-founder-carlos-watson-and-company.html

CBS News — conviction and sentencing background — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-commutes-sentence-ozy-media-founder-carlos-watson-fraud-conviction/

Vinod Khosla / Martins Beach

NPR — U.S. Supreme Court declines Khosla's appeal, Oct. 1, 2018 — https://www.npr.org/2018/10/01/653354580/supreme-court-turns-away-billionaire-who-wanted-to-turn-people-away-from-calif-b

Surfrider Foundation — case history, Surfrider v. Martins Beach I and II, LLC — https://www.surfrider.org/media/press-releases/surfriders-martins-beach-victory-stands-as-supreme-court-denies-khoslas

NBC News — First District Court of Appeal rules 3–0 against Khosla — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-court-orders-billionaire-reopen-beloved-beach-n791696

Carly Fiorina / HP

NBC News / AP — Fiorina forced out, February 2005 — https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6939785

PolitiFact — analysis of the HP-Compaq merger, layoffs, and financial record — https://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/may/10/carly-fiorina/carly-fiorina-fights-back-against-hp-layoff-claims

NPR — HP pretexting inquiry, 2006, under Chairwoman Patricia Dunn — https://www.npr.org/2006/09/06/5776980/sec-reviews-hewlett-packard-tactics-in-leak-probe

NBC News — Fiorina's memoir confirms she ordered the first leak probe in Jan. 2005 — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna15140236

The Big Game and the Stanford Axe

Stanford Athletics — Stanford 31, California 10, Nov. 22, 2025 — https://gostanford.com/news/2025/11/22/stanford-dominates-california-to-take-back-the-axe-31-10

The Daily Californian — Cal fumbles the Axe in the 128th Big Game — https://www.dailycal.org/sports/msports/football/cal-fumbles-the-axe-in-128th-big-game/article_8e596b24-7e18-445d-86e0-a1f280b12827.html

Wikipedia — Big Game series record and 2026 date — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Game_(American_football)

No Ethics in Big Tech — https://noethicsinbigtech.com

No Ethics in Big Tech — the book — https://noethicsinbigtech.com/book/

Forever Peace Now (documentary) — https://foreverpeacenow.com

My AWS Story — https://myawsstory.com

Ethics in Tech — https://ethicsintech.com

XI. Editorial Notes and Exclusions

In the interest of the single-source-of-truth standard this series holds itself to, the following editorial decisions are disclosed:

We excluded one individual frequently listed alongside these names — a former Stanford student convicted of felony sexual assault. His conviction is a matter of public record, but this document is a critique of corporate and financial ethics, and placing a sexual violence case inside a satirical listicle would trivialize the harm done to the survivor. It does not belong here. If Stanford's handling of campus sexual assault warrants examination, and it does, it warrants its own document written in a different register.
We excluded a civil allegation made against one of the executives above by a family member. It is a serious allegation and it is publicly denied by the family. Whether it is true or false, it is not comedy material, and this document does not use unadjudicated allegations of interpersonal abuse as punchlines.
We excluded claims about several individuals that we could not verify to a documentary standard, including specific assertions about attendance at Jeffrey Epstein's properties and about calendar entries that have been characterized in circulating summaries but that we could not confirm against a primary source. Where an association is documented — as with Reid Hoffman, by his own repeated public statements — we state it. Where it is not, we omit it. A fact sheet that includes one unverifiable claim forfeits its authority on all the verified ones.
We excluded two individuals whose alleged misconduct was resolved by mutual dismissal or whose sourcing rested on a single unconfirmed report.
We corrected the widely repeated claim that Carly Fiorina was responsible for the HP pretexting scandal. She was not. See Section IV.
We corrected the widely repeated claim that Sam Bankman-Fried attended Stanford. He did not. See Section V.

The people described in this document have access to the finest defamation counsel in the world. That is precisely why every claim here is sourced to a court record, a federal agency, a signed contract, or the subject's own mouth.

Research Credit

Research assistance, source verification, fact-checking, and drafting support for this document were provided by Claude, the AI assistant developed by Anthropic. Every citation was independently retrieved and verified against primary sources during preparation. Several claims that appeared in the original working list were removed or corrected as a result of that verification process; those corrections are documented in Section XI.

As I have written elsewhere: I justify using the power of AI to do good. To the benefit of humanity. A fool with a tool is still a fool — but a researcher with a tool that checks its own citations is faster than a propaganda department with a budget.

Full Legal Disclaimer

This document is published for educational, journalistic, and public-interest purposes. It constitutes commentary, criticism, satire, and reporting on matters of legitimate public concern regarding public figures and public institutions. It is protected expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, under Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution, and under equivalent free expression protections in other jurisdictions where it may be read.

Statements of fact are sourced and linked. Statements of opinion are identified as such. Satirical passages are explicitly marked and are not assertions of fact. Allegations that have not been adjudicated are identified as allegations, and denials are noted where they have been made publicly.

This document does not constitute legal advice. Attorneys, journalists, policymakers, prospective employees, and prospective business partners are encouraged to consult the primary sources linked in Section X rather than relying on this summary.

Corrections may be submitted through NoEthicsInBigTech.com. Verified corrections will be published.