It's hard to believe it's almost been 10 years... let me try to clear things up from my memory.
TF had a ton of BTC in his wallet AFTER the hack. He did not deny this and claimed that this was his personal funds and nothing to do with inputs.io user deposits. I don't remember how much, I can probably find out if I look hard enough, but I believe it was at least $100,000, if not over $1,000,000. I believe what happened is with the cryptoboom he made millions from altcoin trading this money and this is the money he used to repay everyone. I believe that the only reason he did that was because his IRL identity is somewhat known to people and now that he was a multi-millionaire the best move was to repay people to avoid any potential legal issues.
I also think the hack was made up. He blamed the hosting provider linode for the hack. For people who don't know, there was a few hacks that happened back in 2011-2012 with sites that were hosting on linode that had 2fa bypassed, and the company was literally hated by the community. It seemed laughable that he would choose that provider. At the tiem everyone who heard that he was using linode thought he had to be faking, it was just too convenient that he was claiming to be another linode victim. He also never preserved any of the logs or any evidence of the hack from back then. Also all of "his" money he had after the hack was heavily washed through bitcoin mixers so could easily have been the same coins.
I believe the hack was made up because his business model was not sustainable and he was losing money for months before this, and this was his way out of the situation. He had 3 businesses, coinchat, a website that paid people for chatting, inputs.io a wallet that had no fees for offchain payments, and coinlenders, a lending site. In that time period, peole who got into lending lost big time, all those p2p lending platforms ended badly. So it's not exactly clear how he was turning any profit, but he was was regularly throwing around cash, making 100btc+ bets on gambling websites such as justdice etc.
So thats basically my opinion on how things went. He was a very young lonely dude, talented for his age but wayyy too cocky, he launched 3 websites. They got a lot of users, he made a lot of friends and enjoyed the online reputation he had. But the businesses never made any money. So once his websites bled too much money, he faked the hack and ran away with the rest of the funds, got into altcoin trading and made bank, then decided his best move was to pay back the people he scammed.
There way more stuff I could talk about, it's slowly coming back to me, but hence I am lazy.