Status-seeking rather than money drove Madoff’s fraud.

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: Madoff’s motive being social rank rather than money is a useful concrete case when the vault’s work touches on status-based rather than material drivers of harm.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1459