There's no shame in failing at a business. The best of us do it, learn from it, and grow... but that's not the sort of failure George is referring to. He's talking about the kind where your business robs $10m from people that trusted you and then you just go on your merry way without fixing any of the damage. Saying "it was my fault for trusting some other guy" is not taking responsibility. That's passing the buck and avoiding responsibility.
If one of my business partners conned me out of control of Fort Galt and screwed people over, I would deal with the perpetrator by whatever means necessary and I wouldn't spend a dime on myself until all of the victims were reimbursed and my good name was secured. There was a time, years ago, when I expected that kind of upstanding leadership from Jeff but now, three years later, I find myself here in Chile, working to restore the Galt name that was left in shambles because of his colossal clusterfuckery.
On the bright side, nobody died so the damage is still fixable. If he wanted to, Jeff could still make things right and regain my respect... but then there would still be all the passport scam stuff too but I wasn't involved with that so I won't pretend to have anything too useful to say about it. One step at a time, right?