StubHub's CEO caught scalping their own tickets

StubHub's CEO getting named personally in a deceptive practices suit over mass scalping is almost too on the nose. The platform has always been a middleman that profits from scarcity, but actively using bots to buy up inventory and resell at a markup? That is not a bug in the secondary market. That is the business model now. The real question is why the law still treats ticket resale as a free market. We regulate financial exchanges for exactly this kind of manipulation. But when it comes to live events, we let platforms run their own private auctions with zero transparency. StubHub was caught because the math stopped adding up, not because the system was designed to be fair. This should force a conversation about platform liability for algorithmic pricing. If you build a marketplace and then write software to corner supply on that same marketplace, you are not a neutral broker. You are a scalper with a nicer website. Regulators need to stop treating secondary ticketing as a tech innovation and start treating it as what it is: a regulated financial instrument for access to culture. The CEO being named matters. It signals that courts are finally willing to pierce the corporate veil when the platform is the scalper. That is the only kind of accountability that changes behavior.