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