Advocating Theft and Fraud?!

09/19/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

From the What-The-Hell-Were-You-Thinking Department: Sam Dinkin gets extremely close to advocating credit card and securities fraud in Don't read this column. In the classic silliness of things like “Don't Steal This Book” he suggests that one might fund your favorite space startup with massive amounts of money stolen from credit card companies by driving up your credit limit and then 'cashing out'. He also suggests that you can get around the qualified investor requirement by simply lying to the corporation you want to invest in.

The first is completely unethical and is nothing but pure theft from a credit card company. Why don't we just find the CEO of Visa and just car-jack him? The second is a good way to get your favorite new startup in some deep and really expensive doggy doo with the SEC.

I simply can't understand why someone would suggest these ideas when there are perfectly reasonable methods for investing in small startups that provide legal exceptions to the SEC filing requirements. This is the exact route that The Liftport Group is using.

There are no get rich quick schemes. There is no silver bullet. If you want to fund you space startup then you need to learn how to run a company by doing it. By building wealth by giving profitable value to customers. Suggesting anything else is going to doom this entire business to the silliness that has kept us in LEO for the past 50 years.

Come on Jeff, yank that article before it gets you , Sam or anyone else in trouble. And if I were XCOR I'd insist that my name was yanked from that byline.