Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes jailed for fraud

[Willhire89]

She really does not want to go inside but whatever money she has and all that the Evans clan are willing to throw at this plus knocking out a couple of kids I really doubt are going to swerve this......

[dundarach]

From what I've seen and read, she was suffering from 'pretty privilege' without understanding her own limitations.

What she is, is a failed student who was attractive enough to have her own beliefs echoed back at her enough, probably by desperate men who wanted a shag, to find herself in a place where people who weren't immediately interested in sleeping with her, thought she was actually clever.

The mistake she made was believing she was clever, rather than just exploiting her attractiveness to get herself in a position where being clever wasn't important.

Whether or not she fully knew the implications of her own stupidity, I'm not sure, I think she thought being pretty was enough and other people would fix her problem.

Did she set out to con the world, I don't think she's clever enough to.

[Slaav]

dundarach said:

From what I've seen and read, she was suffering from 'pretty privilege' without understanding her own limitations.

What she is, is a failed student who was attractive enough to have her own beliefs echoed back at her enough, probably by desperate men who wanted a shag, to find herself in a place where people who weren't immediately interested in sleeping with her, thought she was actually clever.

The mistake she made was believing she was clever, rather than just exploiting her attractiveness to get herself in a position where being clever wasn't important.

Whether or not she fully knew the implications of her own stupidity, I'm not sure, I think she thought being pretty was enough and other people would fix her problem.

Did she set out to con the world, I don't think she's clever enough to.

I think Sunny Balwani is actually worse?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07...

He appears to have been much more than a willing participant and crim. His own history seems to suggest that he would have known EXACTLY what he/they were doing all along?

An exert from his own Wiki (Yes, I know) entry:

"In the 1990s, Balwani worked for Lotus Software and Microsoft. During Balwani's tenure at Microsoft he worked in sales.[2] He claims to have written thousands of lines of code. However, independent investigations could not verify this, and numerous Microsoft managers who were asked about him could not remember him.[2] While at Microsoft, he met a Japanese artist, Keiko Fujimoto, who became his wife.[2]

In late 1999 he joined CommerceBid.com as President.[2] It was a software development company that helped businesses buy and sell items via auctions over the burgeoning Internet.[13][15] In 1999, the company was purchased by Commerce One, another business development software company with a high valuation. The buyout was done entirely with stock,[13] and Balwani joined the board of the new company. In July 2000, Balwani sold his shares in Commerce One, netting nearly $40 million shortly before the company went out of business, just before the dot com bubble burst.[13][16] He later went back to school and received a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003.[13] He spent another four years in a computer science graduate program at Stanford University, but dropped out in 2008.[13]"

Full link and worth a cursory read if your interested in more backstory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Balwani

Working on the basis that anybody reading this thread has an interest in these clowns and Theranos generally, the podcast really is worth ploughing through. There is a good book that goes into huge detail also which sounds like a total work of fiction until you remember that these guys are going to prison so it did happen.

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-S...

[Carl_Manchester]

julian64 said:

I'm torn on this. I think she was pretty brilliant

....at fraud ?

I think once the test labs and contracts had been setup, it was fairly clear to me that it was a criminal enterprise founded on fraud.

In the end, it was not that much different to a standard Ponzi scheme.

It's one of the reasons why the U.S Military complex has been so successful with creating innovative ground breaking things, they can swallow the risks of failure for things that are potential game changers and hide the failures from view (sometimes) in a legal way.

[dundarach]

Slaav said:

I think Sunny Balwani is actually worse?

I agree, I was going to add that to my comments!!

[poo at Paul's]

Well who’d have thunk it, she’s not going to prison at the end of April after all……

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-6540691...

[Zetec-S]

poo at Paul's said:

Well who’d have thunk it, she’s not going to prison at the end of April after all……

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-6540691...

I'm shocked...

[Four Litre]

poo at Paul's said:

Well who’d have thunk it, she’s not going to prison at the end of April after all……

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-6540691...

Just following Balwani's approach, but just delaying the inevitable. I imagine a lot of powerful people lost a lot of money in this, hence there is no way she is going to escape Jail, on a technicality for a few weeks at best. She may as well just get on with it.

[Ecosseven]

Four Litre said:

poo at Paul's said:

Well who’d have thunk it, she’s not going to prison at the end of April after all……

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-6540691...

Just following Balwani's approach, but just delaying the inevitable. I imagine a lot of powerful people lost a lot of money in this, hence there is no way she is going to escape Jail, on a technicality for a few weeks at best. She may as well just get on with it.

If her sentence is 11 years when will she be eligible for parole? If it were me and the lawyers were telling me going to jail was inevitable I would want the sentence to start as soon as possible.

[ChocolateFrog]

She won't serve any time, far too rich and/or connected to wealth.

I've probably already said exactly this on this thread.

[tim0409]

ChocolateFrog said:

She won't serve any time, far too rich and/or connected to wealth.

I've probably already said exactly this on this thread.

I’m not sure how you reach that conclusion. If being well connected and wealthy was enough to avoid a jail sentence in her case, then I’m sure she would have extricated herself from the inevitable by now. By filing an appeal, she has only delayed the sentence by a month or so.

She’s going to jail.

[julian64]

I would be okay with her avoiding jail. I believe she has stuff she can contribute to the overall benefit of society.

I may be wrong of course, and she may just be a bad'un. But I think I'm right

[iphonedyou]

ChocolateFrog said:

She won't serve any time, far too rich and/or connected to wealth.

I've probably already said exactly this on this thread.

Are you talking about a different case entirely!?

[98elise]

tim0409 said:

ChocolateFrog said:

She won't serve any time, far too rich and/or connected to wealth.

I've probably already said exactly this on this thread.

I’m not sure how you reach that conclusion. If being well connected and wealthy was enough to avoid a jail sentence in her case, then I’m sure she would have extricated herself from the inevitable by now. By filing an appeal, she has only delayed the sentence by a month or so.

She’s going to jail.

Agreed. She is going to jail.

[mick987]

She ripped off the wrong people, she is going to jail

[MesoForm]

julian64 said:

I would be okay with her avoiding jail. I believe she has stuff she can contribute to the overall benefit of society.

I may be wrong of course, and she may just be a bad'un. But I think I'm right

She had a harebrained idea that would've been genuinely beneficial, used her connections and pretty-privilege to get it off the ground, made a decent stab at it but it just didn't work.
She then used the "fake it 'til you make it" mentality of Silicon Valley to prolong the funding and development of her idea, just lying to people saying her product is working well when it wasn't, ducking and weaving to buy the company time to get it working.
It all fell down because "fake it 'til you make it" is all fine with delivery apps, self-driving cars, etc. but she was in medical devices where people's health is at stake so sooner or later she was going to get found out.
The Bad Blood book and Dropout TV series are very good and showing all this.

[julian64]

MesoForm said:

julian64 said:

I would be okay with her avoiding jail. I believe she has stuff she can contribute to the overall benefit of society.

I may be wrong of course, and she may just be a bad'un. But I think I'm right

She had a harebrained idea that would've been genuinely beneficial, used her connections and pretty-privilege to get it off the ground, made a decent stab at it but it just didn't work.
She then used the "fake it 'til you make it" mentality of Silicon Valley to prolong the funding and development of her idea, just lying to people saying her product is working well when it wasn't, ducking and weaving to buy the company time to get it working.
It all fell down because "fake it 'til you make it" is all fine with delivery apps, self-driving cars, etc. but she was in medical devices where people's health is at stake so sooner or later she was going to get found out.
The Bad Blood book and Dropout TV series are very good and showing all this.

Yep I watched the documentary on her, which is where I formed my opinion above. I think your synopsis is different to mind

[sugerbear]

tim0409 said:

ChocolateFrog said:

She won't serve any time, far too rich and/or connected to wealth.

I've probably already said exactly this on this thread.

I’m not sure how you reach that conclusion. If being well connected and wealthy was enough to avoid a jail sentence in her case, then I’m sure she would have extricated herself from the inevitable by now. By filing an appeal, she has only delayed the sentence by a month or so.

She’s going to jail.

She will be going to a soft white jail.

[tim0409]

julian64 said:

Yep I watched the documentary on her, which is where I formed my opinion above. I think your synopsis is different to mind

So you are entirely unconcerned that she knowingly falsified test results for cancer patients and HIV diagnoses in order to carry on her grift for a bit longer? Or the fact that she perpetrated a massive financial fraud on investors?

Just because she had the imagination/delusion to come up with an idea that had no basis in current technology, we should give her a pass? Yours is a very odd conclusion to reach based an all the available evidence.

[julian64]

tim0409 said:

julian64 said:

Yep I watched the documentary on her, which is where I formed my opinion above. I think your synopsis is different to mind

So you are entirely unconcerned that she knowingly falsified test results for cancer patients and HIV diagnoses in order to carry on her grift for a bit longer? Or the fact that she perpetrated a massive financial fraud on investors?

Just because she had the imagination/delusion to come up with an idea that had no basis in current technology, we should give her a pass? Yours is a very odd conclusion to reach based an all the available evidence.

You are completely ignoring the grey and looking at the white/black. If I adopt your style I would say that no financial institution should invest in something they don't understand, and then put pressure on a scientist to falsify results, then scream blue murder that they aren't getting a free ride on someone else's ideas with virtually no due diligence done.

But if I want to go back to my gray and probably difficult to understand position I would say it was a meeting a scientist over egging her work, with incompetent financial institutions unwilling to admit their error.

As for your comments about no basis in current technology you may want to look at recent strides in blood testing for advance detection of non specific cancer markers. There is a revolution in medicine coming, its just that its not a great mix with greedy investors, or less than transparent scientists