At no point in my life would I choose to spend 10 years in jail for $400m. Only if my current living situation was very poor and this was my only way out of it. I can sort of imagine why one would... but it seems like an awful decision to me.
It seems more plausible to me he actually doesn't have the gold.
Could it be the sunk cost fallacy? He started out thinking he’d spend a few weeks, then a few months… and before long, he has been in there for years and so he must continue with the lie lest he have wasted years of his life.
I’m amused but I guess not shocked or surprised that some people below this comment have different limits on what they’ll do for money than I do. I 100% would not spend any significant time restricting my freedom in jail for ANY amount of money. You can extend my principle to doing other things for money, also. I think my principle might come down to: I won’t trade myself (me, I don’t mean my time or my knowledge) for money. I won’t relinquish my autonomy or control for your money. Yet some will.
He could have just give the investors say 80% of what he found and hid the rest without them even knowing the true amount
> At no point in my life would I choose to spend 10 years in jail for $400m.
I can assure you more than a billion people gladly would...
you can save hundreds, maybe thousands, from poverty and hunger with that kind of money
10 years is nothing compared to 400m
I would in a heartbeat. $400,000,000 is never-work-again-in-your-life money. Not just for me, but for my parents and other members of my family. You could put it into bonds at a mere 2% APY (far lower than current interest rates) and get 8 million dollars per year in interest for doing nothing.
At 16 waking hours per day, we're losing at least half of that with work, so it would only take 1 additional decade before I break even in terms of time, not even considering the vastly improved quality of life having millions of dollars of annual passive income nets you. I could even afford dram.