You have to convince him first it is what he wants to do. He seems very fixated on being a cyber criminal at this time and money is unlikely to sway him.

Don't get me wrong, he deserves a long and drawn out lesson on morals,

So do the executives of rockstar and every major game studio.

This kid deserves a 7-8 digits salary as a pentester, not prison; plenty of pentesting companies would hire him in a heartbeat.

I keep hearing this.

Find me any company that will hire someone so unstable and destructive, and I'll show you a company with bad hiring practices.

This is someone you can never count on to do anything they don't want to do. Someone who will destroy things if they don't get their way. Triple letters won't touch him.

Also, let's be clear, a lot of this was social engineering. He didn't do anything impressive, he just did things others wouldn't be brazen enough to do because they didn't want to get caught.

This kid deserves a 7-8 digits salary as a pentester, not prison; plenty of pentesting companies would hire him in a heartbeat.

You're forgetting a vitally important part of being a pentester.

Namely that they need to be trusted not to leak billions of dollars worth of trade secrets.

This kid is a prodigy as a black hat, but he'd be an embarrassment as a pentester.

He’s talented, but the problem is jobs like pen testing require a LOT of trust to work in. So far this guy has said and shown that he intents on staying in cybercrime rather than doing legitimate work.

As it stands, given how he’s acted, I can’t see a single company that would let him pen test their systems or a red team that would take that risk to their reputation.

I want to bet this dude is a giant asshole. Not sure why people keep making a hero out of him, he sounds like an awful person.

As far as I recall he actively seeks to commit cybercrimes and even says so himself.

It's not the first young hacker on the spectrum that has urges to hack stuff.

It's a whole different question when someone is conscious he is doing something illegal and actively seeks to do it.

This is not another Aaron Swartz story imo. It's an autistic individual that doesn't hack out of curiosity but in order to damage businesses, and people or benefit himself.

He deserved (past tense) all that opportunity before he proved his willingness to use it to do damage. Given his dedication to committing crime, I can't imagine who would ever trust him enough to want his talents.

Unfortunate that society punishes those that can do things that a lot of people don't understand

From what I've read the kid is a genius but also has mental issues that makes him want to perform criminal acts all the time