What motivated America’s most notorious computer hacker? “At first I did it for monetary reasons. …By then I’d already created the snowball and had to keep doing it.” “He claims his intentions were partly admirable. Gonzalez relished the intellectual challenges of cybercrime too. He is not a gifted programmer, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace. But he also liked stealing: “Whatever morality I should have been feeling was trumped by the thrill.” And he liked spending. He referring to his scheme as Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’.