Elizabeth Holmes Speaks (yahoo.com) 161
Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the media since 2016. Now convicted on criminal fraud charges — and counting down the days until she reports for prison — Holmes finally breaks the silence in a profile published today in the New York Times.
"I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..."
Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again."
But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult...
What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond...
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not...
It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.
"I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..."
Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again."
But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult...
What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond...
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not...
It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.
She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: She is a deranged corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
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there was so much I didn't know and understand
Daddy's little rich girl didn't know or understand that there's real people out there in the real world? That her actions would have real consequences?
Theranos doesn't cure them? Let them eat cake instead!
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem was one layer above her in management
Any real medical device research company would have a Board stacked with experts in medical research and medical devices.
Instead Theranos had a board full of politicians and rich bankers that seemed from the beginning structured to ~~abuse~~ *use* their political connections to manipulate government contracts to pump a stock.
Theranos's Board:
Heck, two or three of those guys are among the favorite targets of conspiracy theory speculators.
And they almost pulled it off.
The thing that gets me is that all the focus was on Elizabeth and her Boyfriend; and none of the blame trickled up to her bosses listed above. All the CEO does is execute on the Board's will - and even though [Shultz's grandson (who worked there) told George about it, all the Board did is hire lawyers to try to shut the kid up](https://youtu.be/9wf_2KYRPWQ?t=646).
Remember the JP Morgan quote ["The CEO is just a hired hand."](https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/01/12/357916/index.htm)
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was mostly just a cute figurehead/scapegoat.
The real problem was one layer above her in management
You paint a picture of an innocent Goldilocks but all these people joined the board well after Theranos was incorporated.
I doubt the members of the board are any less guilty than Elizabeth Holmes but their membership can easily be explained. If you want to make sure the government buys a product for military personnel, and presumably as much of that product as possible (for as much mark up as possible) in the guise that our soldiers need the best tools, having board members with federal and military connections makes a lot of sense.
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
You paint a picture of an innocent Goldilocks but all these people joined the board well after Theranos was incorporated.
There's an interesting point there though. Did they join the board before Theranos went really fraudulent. Does anyone have the timeline on the fraud? As far as I can tell, Theranos started in 2003 with Holmes plans for a wearable medication dose monitor and blood tester. The company had an explosion in stock value and there was a gushing Wired article about Holmes and Theranos with the single drop of blood claim about 10 years later. Can anyone flesh out what happened in the interim? It really does seem like the company started with sincere attempts to develop the original technology Holmes was pursuing, when in the timeline did it actually get shady and how does that compare with when the members of the board came on.
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I doubt those guys thought they’d make money on a fraudulent product. They thought they were going to get legitimate government contracts.
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I doubt those guys thought they’d make money on a fraudulent product. They thought they were going to get legitimate government contracts.
Who, the board of directors? Because they're a list of such fine, upstanding citizens?
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Oh no they’re a bunch of guys who suck at the government teat trying to draw out every little drop regardless of what actual value they bring. This sounds awful to you and I but it’s absolutely normal thinking to these guys and they’ve been surrounded by it their whole careers. They probably at least expected they could deliver a real product and use their connectedness to charge the government way more than anyone else is paying, which once again seems shamefully dishonest to you and I
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They’re bad people but they weren’t doing anything that wasn’t established as legitimate and upstanding behavior by grifters 4 and 5 generations back.
The problem is, that also seems to mostly apply to Holmes. A lot of what she did seems damning but, as I pointed out in another thread, "alternative" medicine does much worse every day of the week. How many alternative medicine hucksters are there who are responsible for the deaths of scores of people? Hundreds? Thousands even? What was so special about Holmes and her partner that they were singled out from a sea of fraud? There are even other medical device companies perpetrating the exact same medical fra
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Her board thought they had a legitimate product in the works, probably every single one of them. They’re entrenched high level grifters, they’re not going to bother peddling fake medicine when they could just as easily go on a campaign to replace the classic government ballpoint pen from the national stock system.
Her board was apparently mostly appointed by board member George Shultz, who came on in 2011, 8 years after the founding, apparently meaning that they didn't have much of a board before that. He was a former member of the Nixon administration and Reagan's secretary of state and an advisor to Bush who helped formulate the doctrine of pre-emptive war that was used for Afghanistan and Iraq. He also clearly obstructed justice in the Theranos case by trying to silence his own whistle-blower nephew (which also su
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
You paint a picture of an innocent Goldilocks but all these people joined the board well after Theranos was incorporated.
There's an interesting point there though. Did they join the board before Theranos went really fraudulent. Does anyone have the timeline on the fraud? As far as I can tell, Theranos started in 2003 with Holmes plans for a wearable medication dose monitor and blood tester. The company had an explosion in stock value and there was a gushing Wired article about Holmes and Theranos with the single drop of blood claim about 10 years later. Can anyone flesh out what happened in the interim? It really does seem like the company started with sincere attempts to develop the original technology Holmes was pursuing, when in the timeline did it actually get shady and how does that compare with when the members of the board came on.
As with all cockups there are multiple causes.
One of the first is political. There was so much excitement about Holmes as this attractive female billionaire. Looking at the interviews with her, the billionaire status was equally and often more important with the technology. So there were people lines up that wanted her to be a feminist figurehead, like it or not.
Then there was the technological aspect. Maybe the concept would work in some sort of 25th century Star Trek universe. You walk into the local Walgreens, and with a drop of blood, get every test there is.
Damn - that dilution level seems almost like holistic medicine. And it never did work. Because technologically, it couldn't.
That Board of Directors - Foege from the CDC was the only person who might make an informed decision.
A BOD needs people who are capable of making informed directives. There is a place for one or two big picture people and a skeptic, but that BOD was like having Miss Pretty's Kindergarten class overseeing the Manhattan District project.
So Holmes, while being re-written as a victim here, was a fully knowledgeable and active participant in the grift.
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Then there was the technological aspect. Maybe the concept would work in some sort of 25th century Star Trek universe. You walk into the local Walgreens, and with a drop of blood, get every test there is.
Damn - that dilution level seems almost like holistic medicine. And it never did work. Because technologically, it couldn't.
Sure, but that - single drop of blood and get every test there is - promotional line was not the original pitch. Theranos was actually founded to do something different. A wearable or maybe even implantable device for monitoring various health levels and controlling drug doses. That is a pretty good idea. As an idea, it's reasonably obvious. It's certainly not unique to Holmes. Many, many people have had that idea individually. Still, as an actual goal to work towards, it was not so bad. Somewhere along the
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I doubt the members of the board are any less guilty than Elizabeth Holmes but their membership can easily be explained.
I mean, in a moral sense, we're talking about Henry Kissinger [wikipedia.org]. His "innocence" is a matter of realpolitik and the untouchability of having done things that might normally be considered criminal whilst being in an office of state which provides him with immunity. His trial will only ever be in the eye of the public.
However, these are wealthy people of the type that don't voluntarily get involved in small scale crime like Theranos and it's medical fraud. There's almost no way he went in with anything other th
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Interesting)
Off-topic - but speaking of Kissinger. 15-20 years ago he was considered toxic by just about everyone of just about every political persuasion other than John Birch Society members.
Is it just me or did it suddenly, around the start of the pandemic or so, become socially acceptable to re-share Kissinger's opinions, and otherwise be publicly associated with him again? Especially for folks on the political left.
How did he manage go from almost being universally viewed as a villain and likely war criminal to elder statesman? I wonder what I missed there, or is it just his name is from that late stage Vietnam War era of neo-conservative foundlings while being anti-Trump therefor all is forgiven?
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Possibly because the people with first-hand memory of his bastardly are dying off. I'm probably on the older side of Slashdot's readership. But all of Kissinger's Nixonian shenanigans were still over and done with well before I was even born, much less old enough to know about and understand them. I can read about them. I can be of the opinion that he should be held accountable. But I just don't have the same visceral feelings backing that up as... say... a Vietnamese civilian who was doused with Agent
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Informative)
She was the CEO. There was no "layer above her in management."
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a board of directors does. They do not get involved in product design.
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Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was the CEO. There was no "layer above her in management."
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a board of directors does. They do not get involved in product design.
They don't, but their responsibility is to ensure that the company is going in the right direction, which includes making sure that the CEO is doing the right sorts of things. The AC's point about what sort of people you'd normally expect to find on the board of a medical research company is exactly on point.
IMO, this is a story of a confluence of bad trends. It was started by a young, foolish and sincere girl who created a compelling persona and a compelling set of corporate goals, but that would have gotten nowhere without a bunch of VCs piling into an area they knew nothing about and failing to do their due diligence or exercise appropriate oversight in their rabid search for the next world-changing startup.
I think DEI likely played a role, too. Years ago, no one would have given a 19 year-old girl any credibility, no matter how deep her voice or how Jobs-esque her fashion choices, because she was a young girl -- because of both parts of that, the "young" part and the "girl" part. An attempt to break those stereotyped views on who can be a good business leader was and is underway, and that attempt led people to get overly excited about Holmes and her company. Don't get me wrong, we do want and need to break those stereotypes and find talent wherever it lies, not just in old white men. But I think people got carried away and let their desire to support an iconoclast override their good sense.
Contrast this with, say, the early days of Google. Page and Brin were older than Holmes, but equally lacking in business experience and the response of the VCs was to insist on "adult supervision", in the form of Eric Schmidt. I'm not a fan of Schmidt, but he had real experience running businesses and I suspect that without his influence Google might well have crashed and burned. Page and Brin were idealistically opposed to the advertising revenue model, but Schmidt forced them to accept that you can't have a company without revenue and they couldn't find any other approach that worked. Finally they compromised and accepted the non-intrusive, text-only ads, and the company became incredibly successful (and later at least partially abandoned the idealistic restrictions on ad forms).
The Theranos VCs and board absolutely should have done something similar, either insisting on bringing some experienced pharmaceutical or medical device CEO in to take the reins, or at least bringing in someone to do some oversight and due diligence. But they were too impressed with their own "genius" and moral rectitude at recognizing and supporting the genius young girl to bother with such basic, obvious due diligence.
Holmes is no innocent here, but neither is she fully culpable. She really should have been able to rely on older, wiser heads to force her to face the truth that her ideas weren't working. But they let her get away with it and she ended up trapped in a web of her own overly-optimistic projections which gradually morphed into flat lies. She should have had the moral fortitude (and recognition of legal danger) to refuse to baldly lie to investors when things weren't going well. But the VCs and the board should not have given her carte blanche.
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Interesting)
She was the CEO. There was no "layer above her in management."
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a board of directors does. They do not get involved in product design.
But they are at least in a sane world, know something about what they are doing.
Every BOD I've been involved with - and it's been like 5 of them - has people who are there because they know something about the goals of the organization.
To the point where we have set up and brought in advisory committees to look over what we are doing. On the advisory committees is a place to bring in a person who is outside the normal groups that might be involved in the BOD. Something to give a different perspective.
The only person on Theranos' BOD who had some actual qualifications was the Center for Disease Control guy. The rest? That group right there was a big red flag that there was something odd going on. They had pretty much no qualifications.
They could have been told that "We have a new product that takes a picture and tells us the date the person will die", and that BOD would have no way to actually assess that it was bullshit. So taking a drop of blood and running all those tests on it was specious to them. "Well, Elizabeth said we could do it, so I guess we can!"
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She was making big lies for a long time. She claimed to run a business selling compilers to Chinese universities back in the 90s when gcc was around and to this day Indian universities are still pirating Borland C.
You can find her dropping this story quite a bit if you search. Always told with just that much detail and no more.
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The real problem was one layer above her in management
There was no "layer above her in management". She was running the company. Yes, technically, the board of directors is *supposed to be* in charge but that is very rarely the case in any company. The board of directors in any company rarely gets involved in the actually running of the business other than hiring/firing the CEO. In many/most companies the people on the board of directors just show up once a quarter for a board meeting, collect a few thousand dollars for being on the board, and that's abou
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Yes, technically, the board of directors is *supposed to be* in charge but that is very rarely the case in any company.
The board of directors are supposed to push the vision, the E in CEO means they are the one meant to execute it. But when the person who creates the thing becomes the CEO but had the initial vision the board is kind of in a weird place. So while they are in charge in the directorial sense, they don't actually do any of the "doing."
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Yes, technically, the board of directors is *supposed to be* in charge but that is very rarely the case in any company.
The board of directors are supposed to push the vision, the E in CEO means they are the one meant to execute it. But when the person who creates the thing becomes the CEO but had the initial vision the board is kind of in a weird place. So while they are in charge in the directorial sense, they don't actually do any of the "doing."
I've been involved in 5 BOD's now, and unless I'm really bucking the trend, We indeed pushed the vision, we were in charge, and many members did a lot of the doing.
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was mostly just a cute figurehead/scapegoat.
She was a criminal who, once caught, blames somebody else.
"I was naïve and innocent, I got talked into it because I was so naïve and innocent. I lied and cheated and faked results, but it was only because I was so naïve and innocent."
Like pretty much all criminals,
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was mostly just a cute figurehead/scapegoat.
She was a criminal who, once caught, blames somebody else.
"I was naïve and innocent, I got talked into it because I was so naïve and innocent. I lied and cheated and faked results, but it was only because I was so naïve and innocent."
Like pretty much all criminals,
The "I'm just a girl" defense
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Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
She was mostly just a cute figurehead/scapegoat.
She was a criminal who, once caught, blames somebody else.
"I was naïve and innocent, I got talked into it because I was so naïve and innocent. I lied and cheated and faked results, but it was only because I was so naïve and innocent."
Like pretty much all criminals,
The "I'm just a girl" defense
That's pretty much it. And there are people actively re-writing history in order for her to be a victim, not a criminal.
She was a fake, from her attempts to emulate Steve Jobs, to her weird lowering of her voice when she had a perfectly nice voice, to those crazy eyes.
But she was cute, had the required genitalia, and various groups have a narrative that require her to have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous males.
She is a victim! https://www.politico.com/newsl... [politico.com] Women Rule from Politiaco shows us who is really behind it.
She is a victim of bad men https://news.yahoo.com/elizabe... [yahoo.com]
and on and on.
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cool now do Sam Bankman-Fried
The "I identify as a girl" defense
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She definitely seemed to have narcissistic personality disorder and believed her own lies. I think her then-boyfriend took advantage of that and helped push her the rest of the way into believing she could actually achieve it. I don't think he did believe the lies. So when she faked results she's trying to fake it until she makes it with an ego so big that thinks she can actually do it. Still lying. Not innocent. But also taken advantage of.
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She owned at minimum half of the shares so she put them on the board. You'll need to add another layer to your conspiracy to explain this.
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Why does Slashdot give her so much attention?
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Informative)
Why does Slashdot give her so much attention?
Because she was an evil blonde chick running a tech company.
How often does that happen?
The last I can recall was Carly Fiorina, and we hated her too.
Re: She is a corporate crook! (Score:3)
Re:She is a corporate crook! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the first time we heard of her we knew she was a fraud and if you said anything about it you got called names. So it’s really satisfying to watch everyone else slowly getting a clue.
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I'm not rich, well-connected, and so on, meaning that if I broke the law like she did I'd be rotting in prison.
Not like she's going to a Supermax anyway, let her sit in the country club prison for the full sentence. I know, I know... because she's rich and well-connected she'll be lucky to serve half... if she even has to show up at all.
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^ This. ^I'm not rich, well-connected, and so on, meaning that if I broke the law like she did I'd be rotting in prison.
Yep. How come she gets to choose when she goes inside? Who else gets that privilege? What sort of "justice system" is that?
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Who cares!
My sentiments exactly! She's a criminal that took advantage of the entire medical community, please stop giving this woman a public voice.
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Why isn't she already in jail?
And don't give the excuse that it's just because of the pregnancy. Pregnant women end up incarcerated all the time. It's possible to provide both prenatal care and to provide adequate exercise for the health of the fetus, send her to one of those purported 'country club' lower-security institutions with actual grounds and enforce an exercise regimen.
As for bonding with her newborn baby, perhaps she should have considered how her pending conviction would impact her ability to
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Don't be fooled by that sociopath (Score:5, Insightful)
Manipulative sociopath
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"Manipulative sociopath"
does that make her a multipath?
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That is exactly what I thought when I saw the article ...
She could also be deluded ...
Re:Don't be fooled by that sociopath (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that she promised something, didn't deliver, pretended she had it, and gave fake test results to patients, endangering their lives.
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Were the test results to patients fake, or were those just not on the promised equipment? In any case, I get it, but, going back to the FSD example, promising people full self driving also endangers their lives, but there isn't even a hint that Musk would ever actually be criminally prosecuted for his promises.
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I remember reading articles that through the descent, they did both.
Initially they did the work on working equipment, but eventually descended to completely faking the results at times.
https://sports.yahoo.com/dropo... [yahoo.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/2... [cnbc.com]
etc...
Now, I'm concerned because 3 bad test results doesn't mean that the testing was faked, because most tests do have false-positive and false-negative rates. So normally it'd take a bit more. But given that people were using Theranos machines when they bec
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Were the test results to patients fake, or were those just not on the promised equipment?
Worse than that it seems in my understanding. A mixture of both. Some of their own, not properly tested, results mixed in with results from other labs which made it seem that the tests were working.
Re:Don't be fooled by that sociopath (Score:5, Insightful)
But any more so than Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or any of a thousand other tech bros who pursued a fake it until you make it path?
This is silly. She didn't even remotely have a real product - she was lying about pretty much everything.
For Jobs to have been doing the equivalent, he'd have had to been selling an empty shell with cardboard internals and calling it the Apple II.
For Musk to have been doing the equivalent, his "autopilot" would have involved a guy hidden in the trunk, doing the steering and powering the car with pedals.
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This is silly. She didn't even remotely have a real product - she was lying about pretty much everything.
They did make some real products though. Like a finger stick HPV-1 test that apparently actually worked. Now, it might not have really been as good as a full vial blood test, but it was a real product. This is the problem, getting past all the hype to find out what's real. Not Just Holmes and Balwani's hype, but all the hype about their level of fraud. It seems like a lot of people think that they had absolutely no diagnostic gear of their own. They actually did, it just did not work as well as promised. Ev
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It’s been awhile since I bothered looking into the company. She had a real idea and had some real implementations of that idea but it looks like it mostly couldn’t be made to work at least according to experts who seem very confident.
To be honest the medical stuff is beyond me but I was interested because her early life tech stories were suspicious and at the time you couldn’t say so about her and a handful of lesser grifters who latched on to the women in tech movement.
Re: Don't be fooled by that sociopath (Score:3)
>Itâ(TM)s been awhile since I bothered looking into the company. She had a real idea and had some real implementations of that idea but it looks like it mostly couldnâ(TM)t be made to work at least according to experts who seem very confident.
It wasn't a real idea, it was pure fantasy, from somebody with no credibility. It was on par with a hotdog vendor announcing his plan to develop a high performance portable computer entirely powered by the impact of key presses and ambient EM radiation.
Peo
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Maybe. But any more so than Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or any of a thousand other tech bros who pursued a fake it until you make it path?
They were all making real products.
Theranos wasn't. Theranos was knowingly making a fake product that was killing people.
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Finding out what the Theranos Edison machine was supposed to do and actually did is a bit tricky. In part, that's because Theranos obscured things, but all the media reporting about Theranos obscures things too The top google results just repeat the same things, that it didn't work, but are vague about what it didn't work doing. For the most part, the journalists reporting on it are not doing any kind of real research, which is annoying.
Apparently, the machine didn't do anything particularly revolutionary,
Elizabeth Holmes speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
and lies come out of her mouth.
Of course she's going to say things that make her seem sympathetic. She has enormous motivation to say whatever it takes to get herself out of her 11 year prison sentence.
Maybe she was influenced by her boyfriend. But she still knew that she was selling lies, and not just ordinary marketing lies, but lies that caused great harm to many people's lives. Her lies made her very rich. And now she wants us to believe her, now she's really a new person. Does a habitual liar suddenly start telling the truth? It's possible I suppose, but not the first conclusion I would draw.
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and lies come out of her mouth.
Of course she's going to say things that make her seem sympathetic. She has enormous motivation to say whatever it takes to get herself out of her 11 year prison sentence.
Maybe she was influenced by her boyfriend. But she still knew that she was selling lies, and not just ordinary marketing lies, but lies that caused great harm to many people's lives. Her lies made her very rich. And now she wants us to believe her, now she's really a new person. Does a habitual liar suddenly start telling the truth? It's possible I suppose, but not the first conclusion I would draw.
I do have sympathy for the fact she was in a relationship with a much older person who may have pointed her down the wrong path.
But I'd have a lot more sympathy if she really acknowledged just how wrong her path was.
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I s
Re: Elizabeth Holmes speaks (Score:5, Insightful)
Like did she have a solid understanding of the tech she was supposedly selling?
At 19, dropping out of college? No. No, she didn't. She heard the siren song of money and fame.
What really proves her character is having two kids basically during her trial. That's pure, cold-blooded narcissism. Whether the babes were a ploy for sympathy, or this would be her only chance - either way, it's all about her, her, her.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, women can get pretty desperate when it comes to getting kids.
You have to balance that, of course, with thinking about how they'll eventually grow up and not just have them because your body craves popping a kid or two. But even as a man, I can certainly see where that is coming from.
Re: (Score:3)
What really proves her character is having two kids basically during her trial. That's pure, cold-blooded narcissism. Whether the babes were a ploy for sympathy, or this would be her only chance - either way, it's all about her, her, her.
It's some of both. Her official reason is the latter one. She said she wanted to have 5 kids and she's running out of time. But clearly there is a desire for sympathy here too as she keeps getting pregnant and then asking for delays because she is pregnant. My guess is she is trying desperately to get pregnant again while this current delay in her reporting to prison happens and if she does get pregnant, she'll try to use it as an excuse to not report. At this point I think she honestly thinks if
Re: (Score:3)
It's some of both. Her official reason is the latter one. She said she wanted to have 5 kids and she's running out of time.
Even her bullshit cover stories reveal her to be rotten. She’s here talking about how broke and helpless she is but it’s her dream to have 5 kids and we’re supposed to nod and not give her the disgusted looks we reserve for people popping out doomed feral kids for entertainment or for their “legacy”
I think she knows this too but is hoping to pass through some mental loophole where she’s broke but the kids will be fine because she married a millionaire and she doesn
Re: (Score:3)
One thing I've never really heard is whether she plausibly had the technical skills to pull it off. Like did she have a solid understanding of the tech she was supposedly selling?
The answer is no. Her skill is in marketing, and she's really good at it.
Was she someone who could have been a high level researcher if she went down that path?
Probably, but she would need to go back to school for many years.
Re: (Score:2)
The answer is no. Her skill is in marketing, and she's really good at it.
She's a rich white blonde telling a world full of males they're going to be rich while fluttering her eyelashes at them.
How hard can it be?
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming the tech was possible (in the near future) One thing I've never really heard is whether she plausibly had the technical skills to pull it off. Like did she have a solid understanding of the tech she was supposedly selling? Was she someone who could have been a high level researcher if she went down that path? Or are her claims of wanting to finish her breakthrough just more delusion and/or fraud.
She could have been doing research. She had a real idea.and IIRC it involved making a small sample into a large sample and then using electronic sensors on that large sample. I know very little that kind of thing and it and it sounded feasible to my dumb ears.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes speaks (Score:2)
The short answer of why it's infeasible is... they blood taken from a fingertip doesn't contain everything that the blood taken from your arm does, because it physically can't fit through the capillaries.
The first thing required to achieve the goal would be to prove the above wrong, and show how the various things you're testing for are there in sufficient theoretical qualities.
You can amplify what you have, but you can't amplify zero.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't believe for a minute that poor Elizabeth was clueless about her lies. She and her team deliberately pursued money at all cost.
A 19-year-old is plenty old to know that such lying, in pursuit of money, is not OK.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes speaks (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Her lies made her very rich.
On paper. She made her ex-boyfriend very rich but she didn't cash out any shares. She believed in her lies so thoroughly that she was going to ride it out all the way to the end. She's in debt by 10s of millions and has been unemployed for 5 years after only taking a regular salary at Theranos.
I don't have any sympathy for her, but I do think her boyfriend made her narcissism worse and convinced her to believe her lies more than she was willing to alone. He previously walked away with $40 million from s
"I made so many mistakes" (Score:5, Insightful)
Weasel words.
Try:
"I told so many lies."
"I committed so much fraud."
"I abused the trust of others."
etc.
Re: (Score:2)
No, no, those weren't the mistakes.
The mistake was getting caught. I'm sure with a board of directors like, they would have been able to offer plenty of advice on how to keep the corporate veil in place. She should have listened!
I'd rather she didn't (Score:5, Funny)
That fake voice gives me nightmares.
She really only made one mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
It turns out that the quote unquote captains of industry are actually idiots who are there inherited money or blundered into it. They really do not like it when someone comes along and scams them and threatens to show them up for the idiots they actually are. It's not about the money, when you have that much money you never really lose it. It's about the risk of regular run of the mill people realizing what great man theory is and why it's bullshit.
Nobody Cares (Score:3)
Based strictly on her deeds, she could have been one of those criminals our culture puts on a pedestal and idolizes. But since her "defense" is all about making herself seem weak, manipulated, and victimized - she's not cool anymore. She's no longer the strong, independent businesswoman. Or even a garden-variety con artist.
Elizabeth Holmes Speaks... and nobody cares. I think the reason she hasn't spoken to the media in years is mostly due to lack of interest. She's not Rick Ross. She's not Charles Manson. She's not Donald Trump. Nobody is going to be interviewing her in jail 20 years after the fact.
Who gives a fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
She's a lying sociopath and that fake voice sounds completely and utterly ridiculous.
I don't think most people realize she's dumb as fuck. She thinks the hard part of doing something is coming up with the idea.
Her genius idea was literally "Hey, we take a drop of blood and then 'perform a chemistry' on it to diagnose all sorts of things."
This is not an original idea, but this dumb fuck thought she was the first one and that once you had this brilliant idea, the implementation was the easy part.
She is absolutely delusional and has no awareness of just how stupid she is.
Re: (Score:3)
"This is not an original idea, but this dumb fuck thought she was the first one and that once you had this brilliant idea, the implementation was the easy part."
To be fair, that's pretty much how EVERYTHING works today. The popular consensus seems to believe that something we can think of = something we can DO.
cf:
- AI (I mean actual AI, not a self-pruning word prediction algorithm)
- Electric cars for everyone
- Electric freight trucks
- Fusion
- fully AI driven cars
All of these have been covered in the media
It's my boyfriend's fault! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Female privilege. Turn on the waterworks, play the "poor little me was mislead by that bad man" card, get lesser sentence. Bonus points for being pregnant at the time.
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
delusional (Score:4, Insightful)
Does she explain how to do medical fraud? (Score:2)
If not, I am not interested.
the NYTimes hack (Score:2)
writing the article is complicit in the sociopaths manipulative lies.
I just have two questions (Score:4, Interesting)
- Why isn't she giving this interview in an orange jumpsuit? I thought she was supposed to go to the slammer last month.
- Why do terrible people get to give their opinion in the media? That woman should forever be shunned from society.
Re:I just have two questions (Score:4, Insightful)
- Why isn't she giving this interview in an orange jumpsuit? I thought she was supposed to go to the slammer last month.
She's rich. In the American system of justice rich people get lots of extra chances and she's pushing that to the limit so she can have her children before she goes.
- Why do terrible people get to give their opinion in the media? That woman should forever be shunned from society.
She gets attention. Hell, I'm even commenting to you about her at this very moment. That should be good for a few clicks. Some journalist's or advertising copyrighter's kid may have an extra pencil to school just because of this.
What inventions? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company
What inventions? Her "invention" was LITERALLY just the IDEA of "what if we did blood tests with less blood".
That's not an invention. That's just an idle thought. It had no connection to reality. It's just a thought based on the suspicion that the reason why blood tests require so much blood is because The Establishment is keeping innovation out.
Turns out biology, chemistry, and physics needs actual science. Science that doesn't work simply from some dickhead wearing a turtleneck shouting at you and taking the credit for your work of doing something that wasn't really pushing the absolute limits of the real world.
Re: (Score:3)
That's not an invention. That's just an idle thought. It had no connection to reality. It's just a thought based on the suspicion that the reason why blood tests require so much blood is because The Establishment is keeping innovation out.
The idea alone wouldn't be patentable either; I remember seeing ideas for "blood test on a chip" decades before she filed her patents.
I think it'd still be neat if we could do that, at least for some tests. Something like a chip that tests for a dozen diseases or so, blood sugar*, pH, etc...
You might not be able to do some tests this way, like cholesterol, RBC count, etc...
*I know this can be tested with a very small sample - existing units use a small drop of blood.
Just wearing a new mask. (Score:3)
She effortlessly slipped into the defendant role, even made sure she got extra preggers brownie points with the jury⦠now she slips on a new mask, ready to sell some books and interviews.
Do not trust this highly manipulative sociopath for a second.
Re: (Score:2)
She effortlessly slipped into the defendant role, even made sure she got extra preggers brownie points with the jury⦠now she slips on a new mask, ready to sell some books and interviews. Do not trust this highly manipulative sociopath for a second.
Straight up pled her belly after she murdered and looted to her hearts content. Just like the women of old.
She all forgot about AI and crypto! (Score:2)
With those buzzwords, you could have pushed this scam to a whole new level.
Imagine how AI would do all the magic while your information would be absolutely safe because it would be all blockchained to soe crypto thingy!
Especially if she would have slapped a unique boring chimp NFT picture on every machine!
I'm fond of saying (Score:2)
You have the right to speak.
But I have no obligation to listen.
In other words, why would I give a fuck what she has to say?
The banality of evil (Score:2)
Holmes is doing prett
Re: (Score:2)
Terry Gilliam famously said that Schindler's List was a failure because it was a film about success - the heroes win in the end. In reality, the holocaust was about a complete & utter failure of humanity. Dramatic Hollywood "feel-good" stories about the holocaust are just an outright lie.
That's not what Terry Gilliam said because Oskar Schindler was a real person who really did save those Jews.
You're got an approximation of the words, rearranged.
Re: (Score:2)
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The press shouldn't be hanging on her every word & printing her nonsense verbatim. They're just helping a manipulative, scheming psychopath.
I imagine she thinks she’ll get released early and possibly move into some executive role or failing that move into giving keynotes and writing books. She’s fucking radioactive though, she can probably land some of that through the few connections she manages to keep but in business she will get pity positions and get fired when she tries her tricks as the nepo baby who already got caught pulling this shit. After that nobody will stick their neck out for her again.
She can probably do some sma
She started her scam at the wrong time (Score:4, Insightful)
Questions unanswered (Score:2)
...but did she use, you know, the "voice"?
Annoyance (Score:2)
It bothers me that she got less prison time than Mr. Balwani. The evidence showed that she was a willing and informed participant in overt fraud. She knew the limitations of their product, she lied to investors about that product, and she went to significant lengths to conceal the lie. The argument she was less guilty because she was under the influence of her boyfriend craps on decades of progress in gender equality. Put on your big girl pants and enjoy prison.
Still out there working the grift (Score:2)
Cuz ill begotten gain is what it's all about, ain't that right Silicon Valley?
I was tired of this lady in the run up to and including the trial. I'm tired of her now that she's nothing more than a convicted con.
Shut the fuck up bitch and go do your decade. And hope that your kids remember you when you get out.
Not "taken seriously?" (Score:3)
So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19.
Notice the not-so-subtle insinuation here: she felt that she might not be "taken seriously", that people might suspect she "didn't have good technical ideas", because of the fact that she was a "girl".
In fact, the reasons were as follows: 1) She was a teenaged college dropout, and 2) she didn't really have any good technical ideas.
The idea that she was somehow a victim of sexism is both absurd and offensive. In the first place, women are not under-represented in the life sciences; more than 50% of the PhD candidates in molecular biology are female. In the second place, one could plausibly argue that her little charade would not have progressed as far if she were a male, instead of a young and photogenic female who looked good on magazine covers.
Re: (Score:3)
NYT: normalizing white collar crime (Score:2)
Sometimes the NYT makes unquestionably bad ethical decisions, such as this one, to platform a career criminal.
Dilbert is correct once again (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/rogierK/st... [twitter.com]
Idea rats. Their ideas are usually obvious, often wrong, and they have no clue how to implement them. But they think they should be in charge.
jesus christ (Score:2)
Jesus christ. A happy little family she has there, yeah? This screed reads like a propaganda piece.
I can't imagine anything nearly this sympathetic for a man in her position. This seems like a lot of fuss and make-nice because she's an attractive woman - just like her rise to the top was when it was in the news cycles.
All hail the gynocracy.