Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits?
Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges.
Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming.
I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
