Would have been a huge waste of money.
In all likelihood the new owner would want the account to engage in some sort of massive scam; however, it would never work as philipma1957's writing style is inimitable. Also, most of us know he's not the type to launch some kind of project where he's asking for money from the Bitcointalk community. So the account would have been tagged in a matter of days. Same goes even if he was just joining a signature campaign. Additionally, I could come up with a few questions only the real philipma would know the answer to.
Even if he was just trying to do private deals via PM, it would be really hard to scam more than $10k before getting caught.
For the person to have the balls to approach Philipma1957 should tell you that the bidder isn't just an ordinary person and bidding as high as $10k is obvious that such a person isn't a mere poor brat trying to throw around cheap stunts.
For your info, he may be well into the same business as Philipma1957, but in a rather dishonest way and might be able to still answer most of your questions correctly, build trust and then scam a lot of people that have regard for the old account user.
The scammer would be caught, yes and the account tagged, but the extent of the damage done may be very huge that the scammer may not even be at the losing end.
It's a good thing Philipma1957 stood his ground on his integrity. Prevention is always a lot better than cure.