He is an interesting person in that way. I've been casually analyzing the situation and his actions from a personality theory point of view. It's clear that SB

He is an interesting person in that way. I've been casually analyzing the situation and his actions from a personality theory point of view. It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend") But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style. That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way? Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices. He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out. Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc. His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck." In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction. (This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)