Madoff was driven by status striving, not by need for money

Evidence

Madoff’s reflections on his life provide some clues as to why he ceded virtually everything to financial celebrity (Ghosh, 2011). “How could I have done this? I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money.” However, he felt marginalized and excluded from the inner circle of Wall Street power holders. It was not money per se that drove him. Money mainly was a means for him to purchase the symbols of lofty status so that he could display the trappings of privileged rank. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1459

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the psychology of fraud and status as motivation, echoing themes in other white-collar crime literature like the diamond-trade reputation literature on status signaling.