Not sure if anybody’s been following Elizabeth Holmes’ trial.
Recap for those who don’t know what I’m talking about: chemical engineering student at Stanford Elizabeth Holmes gets the idea that we can do lab-grade blood tests using just a drop of blood from pricking a fingertip. Medical professors tell her her idea won’t work. She says fuck it, y’all are wrong, drops from college and uses mom and dad money to start a company to develop a product with that idea in mind. Is joined by boyfriend Ramesh Balwani. Together they raise $700 million dollars, and Holmes is hailed as “the new Steve Jobs.”
Fast forward 10 years later, medical research professors and journalists start poking holes in the company’s claims. The king (queen?) is revealed to be naked, and from the sky start pouring lawsuits and official sanctions until the company goes bankrupt. Holmes and Balwani are indicted on various charges of fraud and conspiracy.
Holmes has just been found guilty of some of the charges against her, but sentencing is postponed until Balwani’s sentencing is pronounced.
Two personal thoughts: this case has been described as a symbol of the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s culture of hype and greed. But clearly the hype of having a young woman succeeding in the mostly male Silicon Valley is more of an effect of current social culture, rather than just the Bay area culture.
Also: arguably, Holmes and Balwani are equally responsible for the con. It wouldn’t surprise me though if the anti-male bias of justice leaves its mark one more time, with Balwani getting a harsher sentence than Holmes. Bearing in mind, Holmes defense was heavily resting on the argument “I’m a poor innocent woman, Balwani made me do it.”
Adding to the list of Holmes playing the “woman” card: she gave birth to a son in 2021. Can’t help but think that was a calculated pregnancy: who would choose to give birth while being at risk of facing decades in prison, if not to influence the outcome of the trial? Reinforcing that idea is a description of Holmes intended defense:
In June 2019, Bloomberg News reported Holmes and Balwani were looking into a possible defense strategy of blaming the media for the downfall of Theranos and whether journalist John Carreyrou’s reporting caused undue influence upon government regulatory agencies in order to write a sensational story for The Wall Street Journal .[75] Later unsealed documents indicated Holmes’s plans to blame Balwani, who “dominated” her to such an extent she was unable to make her own decisions. “Ms. Holmes plans to introduce evidence that Mr. Balwani verbally disparaged her and withdrew ‘affection if she displeased him’; controlled what she ate, how she dressed, how much money she could spend, who she could interact with – essentially dominating her and erasing her capacity to make decisions.” Holmes may also be preparing a “mental defect” defense, to explain why she was dominated by Balwani.
While at the same time the trial showed that:
Evidence was provided of Holmes’s role in faked product demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts, and overstated financials. There was audio and video evidence of Holmes making inflated or misleading claims about Theranos.[4] There were forged documents saying Pfizer and Schering-Plough had validated the company’s blood-testing technology. Holmes admitted to personally manipulating those documents.
I’ve been following the developments when they come up on my Flipboard. It’s all over but the sentencing.
Yeah, she played the woman card twice; once by blaming the man and then by getting preggers before sentencing (showing once again that she is a very selfish person).
Morally, I think she is at least as bad as Martin Shkreli. If she gets a day less than he got, we’ll know the woman cards worked (women do statistically get less time for the same crime, #equalpayday)
It’s outrageous that she was charged with fraud against investors and not fraud against the public. She was very aware of what they were doing (selling services they couldn’t really deliver with their shitty machine which was proven to be a POS, using third party machines secretly, silencing workers and users who complained or pointed any of these things out), but she has played really well her strong and weak woman in a men’s world card. Yahoo finance released a video prior the trial start that was shamelessly making her defence with these arguments and coming to say that that’s what everyone else does…
… except for “everyone else” was selling apps and electronic consumables crap, and not medical devices. I was speechless after seeing what was going on.
OK, I will try. But your whole message was a WTF to me:
What is a “con”? that she’s not going to be charged for sending back shitty, fake test results? I guess that’s a “con” for her, but not a good thing for the rest of the society.
I think she’s facing YEARS unless the defense comes up with something that invalidates the trail, like for example juries talking to the media about their deliberations, and the flaws in their reasoning exposed by these declarations.
Hopefully? Hopefully every single penny she ever had is used for paying back to the people who she scammed and to the society in general. And hopefully she and professional bullshitters like her rot in Hell.
There was a video where you could hear her less manly voice at the beginning of a call, then she switched on her business testicles and went on with her “deep” insights on technology and a better society.
I showed one of her interviews with her massive eyes and man’s voice to my kids…They thought it was fake .
I was also surprised there was no thread on this but too lazy to write it up.
Two points indeed
1.Silicon valley culture， fake it till you make it.
I think that this is indeed fraud and it’s not a defense that other startups get away with fraudilebt promises either.
The medical devices business is one of the most highly regulated there is and there’s little room for bullshittery especially for class II devices.
It either satisfies the analytical requirements , precision and accuracy or it doesn’t. And you can’t hide the details because they will ultimately affect the diagnosis.
Biomarkers for human disease are very chemjcally diverse (DNA , RNA, Proteins and peptides , Antibodies , Lipids, Organic compounds ), can fluctuate at six or seven orders of dynamic range , there’s no one miracle device that can detect all of them with the best sensitivity. A typical pathology lab could have a dozen or more types of instruments and even then will be out sourcing some of their tests.
There’s room to shrink the sample requirement for some tests though, some companies are moving that was with dried blood spots or microsampling devices but they need to be mailed off to specialised labs which will use the appropriate analytical platform for that test under very rigorous protocols and which are constantly vetted by outside equivalence schemes for performance .
The 'I was a silly female ’ defense. Shameful given that she was in charge and the one soliciting the money. So when you are successful you are a strong leader. When you are committing fraud you were abused by men around you ?
I can’t keep realising, especially these last years, how much this is a bullshitters’ World. I mean, it is incredible. It’s good that bullshit has legal consequences.
Especially when she was retaliating against people pointing out problems in the machines. She’s not an innocent inspired visionary. She isn’t. Please find the video Yahoo released before the trial started, watch it, and then ban them from your life. It’s incredible.
So they were sold directly to consumers or to lab techs? And how were these devices able to be marketed without better independent testing? Some regulatory body is definitely at fault.
The devices were never sold to third parties I believe. When they were asked how it worked it was 'proprietary '. Staff forced to sign confidentiality agremeents. It was a fairly sophisticated long con.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the documentary about this (made several years ago). I doubt there’s much that would have emerged in the trial that wasn’t already unearthed.
Pretty incredible how many people fell for it. OTOH the history of medicine and technology is littered with scams, and oftentimes people knew what was going on but they went along with it, because they figured there’d be a payoff for themselves before the house of cards collapsed. The whole dot-com boom was predicated on flipping worthless stocks in a merry-go-round of fraud.
About 50% of modern medicine is either a scam, or just worthless nonsense; sick people tend to grasp at straws, and that’s a nice market for people with atrophied consciences. We could perhaps mention the biggest medical scam in human history at this point, so vast that it makes Holmes look like a rank amateur, particularly since she’s going to jail and they are not. But there are other threads for that.
I think there are several, depending on how you consider a “documentary”. You mean “Blood money”? I watched several videos on this a while back, and I couldn’t believe how long this went on and how much money they got from investors.
Well it got validated early on by some high profile people.
Then it looks like it could be a good target for venture funds making bank. As long as they could flip it at some point and make that profit.
A lot of silicon valley companies over promise on hopium.
I know of some similar medical device projects now to be honest , but they are far more careful/sophisticated in how they go about things. I mean they sell a product that actually works to a certain degree and get doctors to validate it rather than themselves .
That anybody working in the business knows that it is massively over valued for what it does…Well…Do you call that fraud or dumb investors ?
What got her over the line in milking the money from the gullible investors was Holmes. He was the one who recruited big names like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis. These big names gave credibility to the scheme.
I was thinking about this thread in relation to the language learning app that was fishing for donations with buzzwords, name drops, and allusion to “research”. Thanks for bumping it!
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