He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
That's a line, crossed pretty definitively.
Cockroaches.