2013-08-08vanityfair.com

The real mystery, to the insiders, wasn't why Serge had done what he had done. It was why Goldman Sachs had done what it had done. Why on earth call the F.B.I.? Why coach your employees to say what they need to say on a witness stand to maximize the possibility of sending him to prison? Why exploit the ignorance of both the general public and the legal system about complex financial matters to punish this one little guy? Why must the spider always eat the fly?

They had no end of theories about this, but one was more intriguing than the others. It had to do with the nature of Goldman Sachs these days, and the way people who work for the firm get ahead. As one put it, "Every manager of a Wall Street tech group likes to have people believe that his guys are geniuses. Their whole persona among their peers is that what they and their team do can't be replicated. When people find out that 95 percent of their code is open-source, it kills that perception. . . . So when the security people come to them and tell them about the downloads, they can't say, ‘No big deal.' And they can't say, ‘I don't know what he took.'



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