> Well it's like a guy coming up to a bowl of free candy in a place where everyone already has their pockets stuffed with candy, then going to some other place where people haven't got any candy and giving the candy to them.

The merits of that action aside, we don't actually know that's what he's going to do with the money from eBay. We do know that he's going out of his way to convert it to cash, and we also know that he's gone out of his way to make himself seem less trustworthy. Given that cash is fungible and he wants to promote the idea of giving to charity, you'd think he would have given what he expected to make off the card to charity and pointed that out up front, if giving the money to charity were really his intention.

He's converting it because he doesn't think starving children in Africa have much use for a Starbucks gift card.

My point is that if he intends to give the money to starving children in Africa (or, really, to people who say that some percentage will end up being given to starving children...), the fact that money is money means that there's no reason not to do that at once.

I'm not one of those willing to call what Odio did theft; it's merely rude and underhanded. But I do wonder if people who do business with him in the future will not pause to remember that he's proud of being someone who will exploit the exact letter of the rules to his own advantage (probably mere self-satisfaction in this case, but one does wonder why he didn't do the donation first...), even when the spirit of the thing was otherwise. It seems possible that he has given up considerable future income in return for the personal satisfaction he derived from stepping on someone else's fun.

From a business persepctive, Sam Odio's action was fantastic. He made one of the best answers ever seen for the YC application question "when have you hacked a system?"

He walked up to a pile of money just sitting their being used for a suboptimal purpose, and he took it and put it to good use.

I know I'll never buy anything from a business run by Sam Odio, unless he somehow were to redact all this douchery. I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way. There are too many decent people out there to waste time and money with someone like this.

I hope this doesn't come off as callous, but giving the money to charity is irrelevant. That's the whole point of the analogy: candy isn't expensive. We could all have as much as we want. If you want to give candy to underprivileged children, you can go out and buy a big bag yourself for five bucks.

What Sam did (we presume) in giving $500 to charity is noble. It would be much nobler if he had used his own money. What you and others are doing by rationalizing it is essentially saying that none of us has a right to any frivolity so long as there are people starving in the world, and taking things is okay as long as you give them to someone who needs them more. I got pickpocketed on the subway— but you know what, I was just gonna spend that $70 on a new pair of sneakers anyway, and I bet the thief needs new shoes much more than I do.

Which, really, has some validity to it. But that's a way, way larger social issue than the one at hand. If we grant, as we must, that it is okay for an American to drink coffee, what Sam did is a dick move.