This is a well nuanced post. Cheers for the insight!

If this is his line of thinking it still comes off as flawed to me. He is intelligent enough to know that there was a risk involved of people losing their money.

If we assume he weighed the risks and determined that the chance of success in this risky venture outweighed the possibility of many thousands of people losing their life savings; well I suppose we could say he was misguided at best and indifferent to the suffering of others at worst.

At what point do we stop taking what someone says at face value and instead look at their actions?

What was the end game here then? I struggle to see how one can say this shows that SBF practices utilitarianism beyond lip service.

You can only make assumptions as to what his future plans were. His tangible actions thus far have shown more malicious forethought than poor judgement in my opinion, or perhaps a bit of both (as the man himself says the world is not black and white).

If he thought that there's no value in regulation than there's far less negatively impactful ways to go about skirting it than stealing from the commoners. I dunno... maybe use the immense wealth accrued to advocate for real changes in the regulatory bodies. Is that not what a true utilitarian would choose?