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We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

241 points by dnetesn 8y ago

tptacek 8y ago
The book is really good, well-written and paced like a thriller. I never paid any attention to Theranos during its heyday, and it was especially interesting after reading it to go back to the old HN threads about it and see what the community here predicted about it.
- malshe 8y ago
  I agree. I bought the audiobook and I was looking for every opportunity to listen to it and get to the end. It made me actually stay on the elliptical a little longer in the gym :)
Alex3917 8y ago
During a bubble assets are overvalued even when everyone has the known facts. If a valuation is based on fraud then it's not indicative of a bubble.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  The difference between fraud and development is a very small one. As Telsa motors will show in the next 9 months.
  - hawkice 8y ago
    The difference between truth and falsehood matters quite a lot to the people buying and selling securities. Whether you think it matters or not, it definitely determines price, and does so independently of a bubble.
    - zeth___ 8y ago
      The second you're dealing with someone more complicated than an electron true and false are irrelevant. What matters is how true and false something is. Theranos was more false than true, but then again so it Tesla. How Musk will be treated after Telsa implodes will tell us a lot about how sexist our culture is. I'd personally be going for the pitchforks but I don't see many others doing the same.
      - themaninthedark 8y ago
        You are comparing apples to oranges. I have not followed Theranos closely but from what I have read they had no product at all. This would make Theranos completely false. Musk may be over promising as to what his company can deliver with regards to number of units but he has a working product. This is something that has happened time and time again in all industries, if he fails than he is just another run of the mill failure.
        zeth___ 8y ago
        We will make a blood test unit that's the side of a thumb nail and we will build an electric sedan for $35k are both lies. Tesla has no product, they have an expensive prototype.
  - kumarvvr 8y ago
    Why so much hate for Tesla? Maybe Elon is over confident, over enthusiastic, short sighted, etc. but his vision is world class and world changing. And he has delivered, consistently.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      Substitute Elon Musk and Tesla (particularly back in 2017) with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos back in 2014, before the big exposés started coming out. From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? This goes to answer both your comment and (at present) the top comment of this post, which asks why people ignore a chorus of naysayers saying that what's being done is impossible. The entire mindset of the Silicon Valley disrupter--we're the plucky underdog fighting an established oligopoly by doing the impossible (at least for the established oligarchs)--is very ripe for an unethical fraudster to milk. Distinguishing between the two cases is not easy, especially given the tendency to believe your own hype and oversell your current capabilities.
      - fragsworth 8y ago
        This same exact problem is happening in crypto today, but on a much larger scale and in a much more terrifying way. ICO after ICO, people with highly technical backgrounds are making huge claims, many of which are certainly impossible. It is too difficult for a layman to figure out which ones, if any, are legitimate. It requires months of studying to have any idea. Even some of the brightest folks in Crypto (like Vitalik Buterin) seem to avoid talking about other groups (like Cardano), I'm guessing because it's just so damn hard to figure anything out with any certainty. And I think this is intentional on the part of the newer ICOs, because they are largely scamming everyone. What is Vitalik going to say - "I don't understand Cardano"? That wouldn't go over well.
      - psergeant 8y ago
        > From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?
EGreg 8y ago
Betteridge’s law.
aphextron 8y ago
Those stupid scooters and e-bikes will be the Aeron chair of this cycle.
- ggm 8y ago
  Kinda. The community of lower back pain sufferers continues to shop for ex-Dotcom-bust aeron, because the product actually works: its a damn fine chair. E-Bikes coming into the 'cheap as chips' bucket because of a dotcom oversupply, thats good for any city which has 2-stroke fuel nightmares. I've been in China before and after the e-bike craze, and the difference is marked. Its better with e-bikes. But as signifiers of 'it was a craze' -sure, Tru dat.
- keyle 8y ago
  I'm still shopping for a good Aeron chair... I had one years ago and it was the best thing I've every put my tooshie on. Joke aside, a damn fine office chair.
  - bonniemuffin 8y ago
    Aeron is the best damn chair I've ever sat in. It's pretty easy to find them used on craigslist.
  - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
    Odd, I felt they are kinda heavy, too low to the ground, have an overcomplicated set of levers, and not super comfortable. I prefer a $50 chair from office depot...
    - dpark 8y ago
      > too low to the ground What does that mean? The height is adjustable. At full height you still find it too low?
hamtr 8y ago
Weren't most of the investors not actually the "standard" Silicon Valley investors?
- ciscoriordan 8y ago
  It shifted away from Silicon Valley investors as time went on.
- spullara 8y ago
  Nope. Just one in the seed round. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/investors_list https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/i...
rotskoff 8y ago
While Theranos relied heavily on excessive optimism about technology's potential to solve a major problem, it also relied heavily on outright fraud. It's true that they had assembled a board of non-experts that were duped by unrealistic promises, but when the investors were lied to (as is being alleged in court) it seems difficult to say this is a symptom of some sort of cultural problem among investors.
- xevb3k 8y ago
  I just finished reading the new book on Theranos. I’ve seen very similar things at other science based/biotech startups. In particular, over-promising and misrepresenting the state of development. Quite often these companies are funded by traditional tech investors who don’t know how to do DD on science-based/biotech startups. The difference with Theranos is that they messed with the FDA. They did consumer testing, and publicly raised their profile to the point where they couldn’t be ignored. If they hadn’t started doing consumer testing with a device that essentially doesn’t work, I doubt we would have heard of them. Most of the investors would be happy right-off the investment. Even with Theranos, I believe it’s only the smaller investors who are making a fuss now. Larger investors know the money is gone, and there’s not much point in suing.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened after Carreyrou's first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the company.
    - cepth 8y ago
      The timeline/impact is a bit murkier. Carreyou had two big revelations. One was that Theranos was not running blood tests on their proprietary machines, which were supposed to do finger prick draws. The other was that Theranos had submitted fraudulent validation data to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and state regulatory bodies. They did a couple brazenly unethical and illegal things. 1) CMS subcontracts lab inspections to state regulatory bodies. When California lab inspectors visited Theranos, they physically blocked off the door leading to a floor that had the Siemens equipment, presumably to hide the fact that they were not conducting tests on their own proprietary machines. So, the inspectors never actually inspected the relevant labs. 2) Theranos violated "proficiency testing" guidelines. Proficiency testing is the practice of running tests on a sample with a known concentration/result, and comparing results. The spirit, if not the letter, of the guidelines is that you run the tests on the same equipment as would be commercially used. Thus, Theranos sent in fraudulent tests by testing using Siemens machines. This proficiency testing duping was what caused Tyler Schultz to send in an anonymous tip to the New York laboratory regulatory body, and led to his final decision to leave the company. 3) Theranos tried to claim with the FDA that its tests were "laboratory developed tests", i.e. they were unique tests that could not be compared to existing market tests. Carreyrou has a scoop in the book that Theranos benefited greatly from a bureaucratic power grab between the FDA and CMS. Both agencies claim some sort of regulatory oversight for the blood testing market. At least initially, there were many in the FDA who were suspicious, and wanted to send inspectors. But, Theranos's seeming passing of CMS inspections allayed fears in the short term. It was after Carreyrou's first two articles (IIRC), that the FDA sent a surprise inspection. EDIT: I also think that in the book Carreyrou mentions that a number of doctors in the Phoenix area, where Theranos was doing a test pilot of their finger prick tests, had filed complaints with the state or federal regulatory bodies. So, there were definitely people at CMS or FDA who were beginning to pay attention.
Animats 8y ago
Please stop linking to this paywalled site. Thanks.
- coldseattle 8y ago
  Please stop making these comments. If you don't like the site, don't comment. @dang
- Rescis 8y ago
  Atleast on mobile, I experience no paywall. What system are you using?
- chasontherobot 8y ago
  I don't believe nautil.us is paywalled? Wasn't for me, anyway.
- tptacek 8y ago
  You've been here long enough to know --- apart from whether or not Nautilus counts as "paywalled" --- that paywalled sites are fine on HN as long as there is a straightforward way to get around the paywall. Complaints about paywalls are, according to the site guidelines, off topic.
qop 8y ago
Who's surprised? I don't think most people are surprised, but rather frustrated and disenchanted about medical technology and medical innovation outside of university.
ezzaf 8y ago
This snippet is amazing: "Theranos kept up the illusion that they were running a lot of the tests from finger-stick blood draws by hacking the Siemens machines to work with small samples" No wonder they had so many inaccurate test results.
- cepth 8y ago
  The full process as described in the book is even more shocking. Theranos would dilute the finger stick draws, and then run them on the Siemens machines 5 times. In theory, you could then calculate the concentration, and adjust for the dilution. In reality, the diluted samples would have concentrations of the relevant cells and elements that were too low to pick up. To “fix” this, they would do those 5 runs, then calculate the median. And, if you had 5 outliers in all different directions, they’d discard the run and do 5 again. The fact that PhDs and doctors who swore the Hippocratic oath allowed this to go on for over a year is shocking.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    I don't know much about Theranos, but I remember writing a proof in university. The TA in the class was a PhD student doing research in group theory. My proof relied on doing some manipulation of exponents and there was a point where I was doing "1 + (-1) = 0". The TA just could not understand that bit. He was absolutely sure that in some circumstances this wouldn't hold. No amount of discussion about how integers form a field under addition and multiplication would convince him. He eventually got his PhD and I can only assume he's working for a company like Theranos. Cue someone replying and telling me why I was actually the one that was wrong ;-) But the point is that even well educated people make really, really stupid mistakes.
    - cepth 8y ago
      Fair enough! The book is worth the read. I think I may be being a bit unfair to the scientists. Basically, Theranos was a hot enough startup that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani would fire, demote, or marginalize anyone who made a fuss. Lifelong academics may have never had to deal with that kind of bullying/pressure before. On the other hand, they had some pretty incredible scientific talent on staff. You would think that people who are highly cited and have a reputation to protect would have spoke up sooner. Instead, the first two people to make any kind of sustained fuss were two fresh out of college hires.
pseingatl 8y ago
But we can be very surprised at the disparity in treatment between Theranos execs, who got off scott free, and Pharma Bro, who made all his investors whole and still got prison.
- seehafer 8y ago
  Holmes and Balwani still under criminal investigation per last report. We don’t know they yet if they’re going to get off scot free.
- psergeant 8y ago
  Pharma Bro needs to go to prison to stop the next arrogant idiot who thinks he can dig himself out of a hole from attempting to do so. That he actually managed to is great — for his investors — but it’s not a course of action society wants to promote.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    It was pretty much the stock equivalent of check kiting. If you've got enough money coming in, you can often fill accounts before the checks clear and steal nothing; the reason it's illegal is that you're hiding risks by claiming to have the money in hand.
kumarvvr 8y ago
The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media. Maybe that is the next social challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming decade.
- starpilot 8y ago
  > The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. Links? Wasn't Holmes incredibly secretive about everything? It's not like she was promising overunity or anything, just a "radically new approach" type thing.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    The reason why experts knew it was fraud right from the start is not even god can do the assays Holmes was claiming from a single drop of blood - the information is just not present and the variability is too high.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      Where can I read the statements of these expert? Can't find anything before 2015.
- donbright 8y ago
  The Wall Street Journal is the only reason the company was outed. This same journal was also one of her early boosters. We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment. We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.
laferrera 8y ago
Right, and how should we feel about Nautilus as a fraud since they don't pay their contractors? Also not surprised? https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-magazine/ https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Start a new thread, no need for the whataboutism.
mathattack 8y ago
“Only When The Tide Goes Out Do You Discover Who’s Been Swimming Naked.” -Warren Buffett
duxup 8y ago
What I don't get is their failure seemed to be very fundamental. Like anyone who did blood testing knew what their challenges were and they would have had to overcome several serious challenges all at once to make it work and... There was zero indication that they had actually overcome any of those issues.
Gatsky 8y ago
Something went wrong with the personal development of Elizabeth Holmes. How she could have such an astounding deficit of basic integrity is baffling. There must be some mental illness there. She’s a fascinating character, a biotech Wizard of Oz, who thought that if she wore turtlenecks and gave TED talks, the rest of it would fall into place. Cargo Cult Entrepreneurship fails miserably it would seem.
- busterarm 8y ago
  I don't know about you, but I pretty much breezed through school and for the first 20 years of my life pretty much got nothing but praise from adults for how smart I was. Not once in that period did anyone really impart lessons of integrity and hard work. At best, I encountered adults (specifically, teachers) who went out of their way to impede my success, but I usually overcame that. Through that period of my life, I can count the number of people who had a positive influence on my personal development on one finger. I came into my early 20s a combative, arrogant asshole who couldn't really achieve anything and it took almost a decade and significant hardship (including brief periods of homelessness) to undo that. That's not to empathize with Holmes or her fraud, but if I have to be honest, a lot of the "intellectual elite" (in tech) that I encounter think that their shit doesn't stink. Edit: Oh yeah, this feels appropriate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEUh4FZIf8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEUh4FZIf8E
- xapata 8y ago
  Don't be so quick to categorize as wrong and mentally ill. People make odd choices all the time. Once you get set down a path, it's hard to change.
- xevb3k 8y ago
  It’s not that uncommon in my experience. I’ve met several people similar to those in Theranos management. It’s partly “fake it until you make it”, “double think” and a certain lack of understanding of the basic technology. And investors reward that behavior mostly investing in a persons connections and projected confidence. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re by no means the only company like this. In fact, many of them do manage to fake it until they make it and become successful.
clearf 8y ago
An interesting side note about this story is the homogeneity and lack of relevant background among Theranos's board of directors. All the outside directors were white, prestigious (former generals, senators, cabinet secretaries, etc) and relatively old. Research shows that homogenous groups are less likely to challenge each other. My coauthor and I wrote about this in our book Meltdown (Published by Penguin Press in in March). We drew on Carreyrou's excellent reporting and some pretty interesting research about how team diversity affects decision making.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  > Lack of relevant background among Theranos' board of directors Yeah, it's pretty clear that it was by design. Moreover, Holmes seems to have known the impossibility of her claims, or perhaps, was over confident initially about the possibilities of technology and later came to the realization that current technology cannot fulfill her vision. At that point, she should have come clean, but chose to continue the charades.
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nyc111 8y ago
There is this popular Slicon Valley mantra: "Fake it till you make it" I'm wondering if she was trying to follow this mantra but she was stuck too deeply in the fake part.
timavr 8y ago
A little bit controversial, but without taking into account the way the company was run, the only big mistake was using inaccurate machines for testing and putting the people health at risk. Everything else is pretty standard SV startup stuff.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
It works both ways though, a lot of people said Tesla was a fraud and they couldn't build a "real" electric car with a range of 300 miles. And to the credit of the critics they weren't wrong, there was some serious integration of battery technology that had never been done before that made it possible for the Model S to exist. Not that I'm defending Theranos, they should have come out and said "We're running into issues" waaaaaay before they did and way before they put kiosks into Walgreens. That their diagnostic technique seemed impossible to experts doesn't disqualify them, but once they had failed to get it to work themselves, and yet assert that it does. That is when it steps over the line into fraud as far as I am concerned.
- seandougall 8y ago
  I feel like the comparison would work better if Tesla had secretly put gasoline engines in their cars before presenting them to the DOT and EPA. People may have accused them of being a fraud, but that’s not the same thing as accusing them of committing fraud.
- buvanshak 8y ago
  > there was some serious integration of battery technology that had never been done before that made it possible for the Model S to exist. Where can I read about this?
- cepth 8y ago
  I think the differentiator vs. Tesla is that Theranos promised things that are/were physically impossible. Putting aside Tesla's long history of delays, I think it's fair to say that the company has delivered on some of its core technological promises. Battery pack cost per kWh is close to dipping below $100, Tesla has dramatically reduced their use of rare earth metals in their packs, they've helped alleviate concerns around thermal runaway in their packs, and various academic and anecdotal accounts have shown that Tesla batterypacks hold up well even after hundreds of thousands of miles of road use and thousands of recharge cycles. These are all meaningful advancements in basic science. In the Carreyrou book, one clear example is the explanation of why Theranos couldn't possibly do "all blood tests" on a single drop of blood. On an individual test basis, finger pricked blood is different in chemical makeup from blood drawn from a vein. If you're testing for certain diseases, even assuming that you had equipment sensitive enough to find small concentrations of a target element or organism, the finger pricked blood may just not have those markers at all. Secondly, blood testing is a destructive process. If a doctor orders an immunoassay and a pathogen test for a patient, it's close to physically impossible to run both tests on Theranos's much touted "single drop of blood". You would be using up portions of an already tiny sample to perform the reactions necessary for each test. The premise that you could do multiple tests on a single drop of blood was a false one from the start. Third, the purported form factor of Theranos testing machines, a small Apple-esque box, created physics problems from the start. Proteins and cells in blood are hyper-sensitive to temperature. One of Elizabeth Holmes's subordinates literally repurposed a glue robot to perform the basic blood testing tasks that would normally be done by a human. Imagine trying to have a tiny robotic arm trying to pick up tubes of blood from a tray, and perform chemical reactions, all within a shoebox-sized machine. Trying to leave enough room for the robot to physically swing its arm, and maintaining an acceptable level of heat dissipation so as to not destroy the samples was a challenge that Theranos never solved. At a certain point, you're running up against basic laws of physics and the literal limitations of space.
timoth3y 8y ago
It's not unique to Theranos. It's all part of the perverse incentives involved with well-funded tech companies. There is no real incentive to call out fraud. As an investor or a partner you might pass on a deal, but to go public with your concerns means risking a possible lawsuit, raising the ire of the people who are already on the bandwagon, being excluded from future deals, and being dismissed as someone who is out of touch and "not getting it." Contrarians can short publicly-traded companies, so there is a financial incentive to call out BS, but for private companies there is very little upside in raising concerns publicly. If you doubt this effect, contrast the number of articles talking about how blockchain is the future with those taking a hard look at blockchain's financial viability for specific applications. The former group are the ones being asked to speak at conferences and landing large consulting contracts.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  Short traders and put option holders have to also get the timeline and technical factors right to get paid. See the debacle with LongFin. The right play was to go long and make money off borrow fees. The bears got hosed by a trading freeze that kept them from closing their shorts or from acquiring shares to sell for their expiring put options.
  - timoth3y 8y ago
    True. That's why so many of them try to "leak" the problem to journalists after they have taken their short positions. I mean it's not a perfect system, but at least in the public markets, there is some financial incentive to expose deception.
- Torn 8y ago
  I have a strong suspicion another example will be Magic Leap. Note: not as an intentionally-misleading or lying case, but just as another extremely well-funded startup whose launch is likely to fall short of the hype. $2.3bn in funding adds an immense pressure for it to be successful and perceived as revolutionary.
  - 8y ago
transfire 8y ago
All the ballyhoo stunk to high heaven to me -- a case of "doth protest too much". So, my guess is the tech actually worked (even if not as perfect as originally hoped). And the company was destroyed by industry players via government regulation and a massive smear campaign -- and it worked like a charm. Ultimately they even murdered the lead scientist, faking his suicide, to ensure the truth is never known. The tech was simply too disruptive to the hand-over-fist $$$ in the industry, so it had to be put down. And if you think that's crazy, you haven't read enough history.
- dralley 8y ago
  You sound like someone who immediately dismissed "all the ballyhoo" because it wasn't what you wanted to believe. As someone who has followed the whole thing closely, Holmes and Balwani are snakes, and their fraud is undeniable. The tech is so "revolutionary" that they weren't even using it, they just hacked competitors machines to use smaller samples, accuracy rates be damned.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "And if you think that's crazy, you haven't read enough history. " I know! Just read the history of cold fusion and perpetual motion machines:. The establishment and government didn't allow these either :-)
sytelus 8y ago
The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could have done it real easy by stepping aside, let someone inherit the mess and then selling her stack. In fact her board asked her to do just that before WSJ found out and she refused it. I have seen her plenty of talks/interviews and its super hard to believe she was working with malicious plan all along. Part of me wants to feel that her desire was genuine to some extent and she just hoped things would work out if she pulled lies and deception long enough to keep raising funds. She had lots of top tier advisors who have done exactly that to establish their own companies. I'm not defending her by any measure, she was classic bad manager with Balwani topping even her. There was a very little chance she could have actually ran talented team longer term - but this is precisely the part book conveniently leaves out.
- TillE 8y ago
  You start out with an idea you hope you can make work, you fudge a little and naively promise the moon, and soon enough (after a few big investments) you're in so deep there's no way out. Maybe you realize pretty quickly that the technology is a dud, but there's no exit without humiliation so you just keep digging. I don't think she's a sympathetic figure in any way, but it's easy to see how someone could wind up in that situation without having started out as a scammer.
  - growlist 8y ago
    This makes sense to me, as I've asked myself was she bad or deluded? But perhaps instead she started out with the best intentions, only to be forced into gambling with ever greater stakes as each attempt at changing the world fell flat.
- sametmax 8y ago
  She probably believed in her project. You can't know if you are going to succeed when you try to achieve a revolutionary feat. But you have to act like you are sure you will. Imagine Jobs in an alternate universe, trying to get out the iPhone, but after years of failures and billions wasted, the world realize the product vision was unrealistic. Basically him being the same asshole, but hitting a wall many predicted. That would look the same as Theranos. The difference is that Job didn't fail. But he couldn't know that before trying and commit many people and resource to it. Imagine Elon failing as the Falcon X. Or worst, failing over and over until his company died because they lost control of one that went crashing into a school. Imagine Zuckerberg called out about all the privacy issues on FB before it actually made benefit. I would have died. When you try to achieve radical vision, you often either succeed as a hero or you fail as a vilain.
ousta 8y ago
Im gonna be downvoted for this but whatever. This would never have happened if Holmes was a man. America is so obsessed by its desire to empower minorities and woman especially that they will allow them to take risks or do things that no man on earth would be allowed to do hence playing with lives and healthcare at silicon valley scale and with billionare investors. The media is of course the first one to blame for this but also all the PC shit that people endure.
- growlist 8y ago
  From a certain feminist perspective this behaviour would be seen as reassuring in that it demonstrates women are just as capable of bad behaviour as men, and thus are equal.
pandacat 8y ago
Holmes can perhaps join IOTA, it's all the same: - Billion dollar valuation - Not working/Fake technology. - Intimidation against researcher and journalists.
Bakary 8y ago
What amazes me about things like this is that there are so many ways for relevant information to leak out but until revelations reach critical mass the fraud can continue unabated.
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cuddlypsycho 8y ago
Elizabeth Holmes did not happen in a vacuum of course. She is a by-product of a culture that idolizes youth, raw enthusiasm, and passion over experience and pragmatism. Socially shaming and silencing her critics by branding them as old-fashioned, sexist and unsupportive of female CEOs in tech by the media did not help the situation either.
redleggedfrog 8y ago
What about the crazy eyes?! The first time I saw a picture of Holmes I thought, "That's got crazy bad written all over it. Stay...away..."
camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
The hell am I doing working for money when I could just be lying to dumb rich people? Hey Richie Rich, I just invented a machine that cures bowell irregularity by whispering pleasant self-affirmations in your ear. "Relax, you are your body's destiny, release your burdens and fly free." I'll take my billion in cash, please.
Elizabeth2 8y ago
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241 points by dnetesn 8y ago

The book is really good, well-written and paced like a thriller. I never paid any attention to Theranos during its heyday, and it was especially interesting after reading it to go back to the old HN threads about it and see what the community here predicted about it.

malshe 8y ago
I agree. I bought the audiobook and I was looking for every opportunity to listen to it and get to the end. It made me actually stay on the elliptical a little longer in the gym :)

Alex3917 8y ago

During a bubble assets are overvalued even when everyone has the known facts. If a valuation is based on fraud then it's not indicative of a bubble.

zeth___ 8y ago
The difference between fraud and development is a very small one. As Telsa motors will show in the next 9 months.
- hawkice 8y ago
  The difference between truth and falsehood matters quite a lot to the people buying and selling securities. Whether you think it matters or not, it definitely determines price, and does so independently of a bubble.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    The second you're dealing with someone more complicated than an electron true and false are irrelevant. What matters is how true and false something is. Theranos was more false than true, but then again so it Tesla. How Musk will be treated after Telsa implodes will tell us a lot about how sexist our culture is. I'd personally be going for the pitchforks but I don't see many others doing the same.
    - themaninthedark 8y ago
      You are comparing apples to oranges. I have not followed Theranos closely but from what I have read they had no product at all. This would make Theranos completely false. Musk may be over promising as to what his company can deliver with regards to number of units but he has a working product. This is something that has happened time and time again in all industries, if he fails than he is just another run of the mill failure.
      - zeth___ 8y ago
        We will make a blood test unit that's the side of a thumb nail and we will build an electric sedan for $35k are both lies. Tesla has no product, they have an expensive prototype.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  Why so much hate for Tesla? Maybe Elon is over confident, over enthusiastic, short sighted, etc. but his vision is world class and world changing. And he has delivered, consistently.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    Substitute Elon Musk and Tesla (particularly back in 2017) with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos back in 2014, before the big exposés started coming out. From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? This goes to answer both your comment and (at present) the top comment of this post, which asks why people ignore a chorus of naysayers saying that what's being done is impossible. The entire mindset of the Silicon Valley disrupter--we're the plucky underdog fighting an established oligopoly by doing the impossible (at least for the established oligarchs)--is very ripe for an unethical fraudster to milk. Distinguishing between the two cases is not easy, especially given the tendency to believe your own hype and oversell your current capabilities.
    - fragsworth 8y ago
      This same exact problem is happening in crypto today, but on a much larger scale and in a much more terrifying way. ICO after ICO, people with highly technical backgrounds are making huge claims, many of which are certainly impossible. It is too difficult for a layman to figure out which ones, if any, are legitimate. It requires months of studying to have any idea. Even some of the brightest folks in Crypto (like Vitalik Buterin) seem to avoid talking about other groups (like Cardano), I'm guessing because it's just so damn hard to figure anything out with any certainty. And I think this is intentional on the part of the newer ICOs, because they are largely scamming everyone. What is Vitalik going to say - "I don't understand Cardano"? That wouldn't go over well.
    - psergeant 8y ago
      > From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases? You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?

EGreg 8y ago

Betteridge’s law.

aphextron 8y ago

Those stupid scooters and e-bikes will be the Aeron chair of this cycle.

ggm 8y ago
Kinda. The community of lower back pain sufferers continues to shop for ex-Dotcom-bust aeron, because the product actually works: its a damn fine chair. E-Bikes coming into the 'cheap as chips' bucket because of a dotcom oversupply, thats good for any city which has 2-stroke fuel nightmares. I've been in China before and after the e-bike craze, and the difference is marked. Its better with e-bikes. But as signifiers of 'it was a craze' -sure, Tru dat.
keyle 8y ago
I'm still shopping for a good Aeron chair... I had one years ago and it was the best thing I've every put my tooshie on. Joke aside, a damn fine office chair.
- bonniemuffin 8y ago
  Aeron is the best damn chair I've ever sat in. It's pretty easy to find them used on craigslist.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
  Odd, I felt they are kinda heavy, too low to the ground, have an overcomplicated set of levers, and not super comfortable. I prefer a $50 chair from office depot...
  - dpark 8y ago
    > too low to the ground What does that mean? The height is adjustable. At full height you still find it too low?

hamtr 8y ago

Weren't most of the investors not actually the "standard" Silicon Valley investors?

ciscoriordan 8y ago
It shifted away from Silicon Valley investors as time went on.
spullara 8y ago
Nope. Just one in the seed round. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/investors_list https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/theranos/investors/i...

rotskoff 8y ago

While Theranos relied heavily on excessive optimism about technology's potential to solve a major problem, it also relied heavily on outright fraud. It's true that they had assembled a board of non-experts that were duped by unrealistic promises, but when the investors were lied to (as is being alleged in court) it seems difficult to say this is a symptom of some sort of cultural problem among investors.

xevb3k 8y ago
I just finished reading the new book on Theranos. I’ve seen very similar things at other science based/biotech startups. In particular, over-promising and misrepresenting the state of development. Quite often these companies are funded by traditional tech investors who don’t know how to do DD on science-based/biotech startups. The difference with Theranos is that they messed with the FDA. They did consumer testing, and publicly raised their profile to the point where they couldn’t be ignored. If they hadn’t started doing consumer testing with a device that essentially doesn’t work, I doubt we would have heard of them. Most of the investors would be happy right-off the investment. Even with Theranos, I believe it’s only the smaller investors who are making a fuss now. Larger investors know the money is gone, and there’s not much point in suing.
- tptacek 8y ago
  I think most of what went wrong with the FDA happened after Carreyrou's first WSJ article came out, didn't it? That WSJ article basically killed the company.
  - cepth 8y ago
    The timeline/impact is a bit murkier. Carreyou had two big revelations. One was that Theranos was not running blood tests on their proprietary machines, which were supposed to do finger prick draws. The other was that Theranos had submitted fraudulent validation data to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and state regulatory bodies. They did a couple brazenly unethical and illegal things. 1) CMS subcontracts lab inspections to state regulatory bodies. When California lab inspectors visited Theranos, they physically blocked off the door leading to a floor that had the Siemens equipment, presumably to hide the fact that they were not conducting tests on their own proprietary machines. So, the inspectors never actually inspected the relevant labs. 2) Theranos violated "proficiency testing" guidelines. Proficiency testing is the practice of running tests on a sample with a known concentration/result, and comparing results. The spirit, if not the letter, of the guidelines is that you run the tests on the same equipment as would be commercially used. Thus, Theranos sent in fraudulent tests by testing using Siemens machines. This proficiency testing duping was what caused Tyler Schultz to send in an anonymous tip to the New York laboratory regulatory body, and led to his final decision to leave the company. 3) Theranos tried to claim with the FDA that its tests were "laboratory developed tests", i.e. they were unique tests that could not be compared to existing market tests. Carreyrou has a scoop in the book that Theranos benefited greatly from a bureaucratic power grab between the FDA and CMS. Both agencies claim some sort of regulatory oversight for the blood testing market. At least initially, there were many in the FDA who were suspicious, and wanted to send inspectors. But, Theranos's seeming passing of CMS inspections allayed fears in the short term. It was after Carreyrou's first two articles (IIRC), that the FDA sent a surprise inspection. EDIT: I also think that in the book Carreyrou mentions that a number of doctors in the Phoenix area, where Theranos was doing a test pilot of their finger prick tests, had filed complaints with the state or federal regulatory bodies. So, there were definitely people at CMS or FDA who were beginning to pay attention.

Animats 8y ago

Please stop linking to this paywalled site. Thanks.

coldseattle 8y ago
Please stop making these comments. If you don't like the site, don't comment. @dang
Rescis 8y ago
Atleast on mobile, I experience no paywall. What system are you using?
chasontherobot 8y ago
I don't believe nautil.us is paywalled? Wasn't for me, anyway.
tptacek 8y ago
You've been here long enough to know --- apart from whether or not Nautilus counts as "paywalled" --- that paywalled sites are fine on HN as long as there is a straightforward way to get around the paywall. Complaints about paywalls are, according to the site guidelines, off topic.

qop 8y ago

Who's surprised? I don't think most people are surprised, but rather frustrated and disenchanted about medical technology and medical innovation outside of university.

ezzaf 8y ago

This snippet is amazing: "Theranos kept up the illusion that they were running a lot of the tests from finger-stick blood draws by hacking the Siemens machines to work with small samples" No wonder they had so many inaccurate test results.

cepth 8y ago
The full process as described in the book is even more shocking. Theranos would dilute the finger stick draws, and then run them on the Siemens machines 5 times. In theory, you could then calculate the concentration, and adjust for the dilution. In reality, the diluted samples would have concentrations of the relevant cells and elements that were too low to pick up. To “fix” this, they would do those 5 runs, then calculate the median. And, if you had 5 outliers in all different directions, they’d discard the run and do 5 again. The fact that PhDs and doctors who swore the Hippocratic oath allowed this to go on for over a year is shocking.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  I don't know much about Theranos, but I remember writing a proof in university. The TA in the class was a PhD student doing research in group theory. My proof relied on doing some manipulation of exponents and there was a point where I was doing "1 + (-1) = 0". The TA just could not understand that bit. He was absolutely sure that in some circumstances this wouldn't hold. No amount of discussion about how integers form a field under addition and multiplication would convince him. He eventually got his PhD and I can only assume he's working for a company like Theranos. Cue someone replying and telling me why I was actually the one that was wrong ;-) But the point is that even well educated people make really, really stupid mistakes.
  - cepth 8y ago
    Fair enough! The book is worth the read. I think I may be being a bit unfair to the scientists. Basically, Theranos was a hot enough startup that Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani would fire, demote, or marginalize anyone who made a fuss. Lifelong academics may have never had to deal with that kind of bullying/pressure before. On the other hand, they had some pretty incredible scientific talent on staff. You would think that people who are highly cited and have a reputation to protect would have spoke up sooner. Instead, the first two people to make any kind of sustained fuss were two fresh out of college hires.

pseingatl 8y ago

But we can be very surprised at the disparity in treatment between Theranos execs, who got off scott free, and Pharma Bro, who made all his investors whole and still got prison.

seehafer 8y ago
Holmes and Balwani still under criminal investigation per last report. We don’t know they yet if they’re going to get off scot free.
psergeant 8y ago
Pharma Bro needs to go to prison to stop the next arrogant idiot who thinks he can dig himself out of a hole from attempting to do so. That he actually managed to is great — for his investors — but it’s not a course of action society wants to promote.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  It was pretty much the stock equivalent of check kiting. If you've got enough money coming in, you can often fill accounts before the checks clear and steal nothing; the reason it's illegal is that you're hiding risks by claiming to have the money in hand.

kumarvvr 8y ago

The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media. Maybe that is the next social challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming decade.

starpilot 8y ago
> The most amazing thing about this whole situation is that there were experts in the field who were shouting out about the impossibility of Holmes' claims right from the beginning. Links? Wasn't Holmes incredibly secretive about everything? It's not like she was promising overunity or anything, just a "radically new approach" type thing.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  The reason why experts knew it was fraud right from the start is not even god can do the assays Holmes was claiming from a single drop of blood - the information is just not present and the variability is too high.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    Where can I read the statements of these expert? Can't find anything before 2015.
donbright 8y ago
The Wall Street Journal is the only reason the company was outed. This same journal was also one of her early boosters. We already have a framework that preserves independence of the media, the First Amendment. All of the NDAs and Boies style intimidation and legal abuse and harrasment of the whistleblowers and journalists was only stopped by the First Amendment. We already have a framework that punishes journalists - it's people like Peter Thiel suing them out of existence because he doesn't like what they say. It's big funders buying a newspaper and destroying it like the Denver Post. It's the government putting sources on trial and in prison like happened with the NSA stories. Journalists are murdered constantly for reporting stories. And the industry itself is dying because of changing business models. They dont need a framework to punish them any more.

laferrera 8y ago

Right, and how should we feel about Nautilus as a fraud since they don't pay their contractors? Also not surprised? https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-magazine/ https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-...

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Start a new thread, no need for the whataboutism.

mathattack 8y ago

“Only When The Tide Goes Out Do You Discover Who’s Been Swimming Naked.” -Warren Buffett

duxup 8y ago

What I don't get is their failure seemed to be very fundamental. Like anyone who did blood testing knew what their challenges were and they would have had to overcome several serious challenges all at once to make it work and... There was zero indication that they had actually overcome any of those issues.

Gatsky 8y ago

Something went wrong with the personal development of Elizabeth Holmes. How she could have such an astounding deficit of basic integrity is baffling. There must be some mental illness there. She’s a fascinating character, a biotech Wizard of Oz, who thought that if she wore turtlenecks and gave TED talks, the rest of it would fall into place. Cargo Cult Entrepreneurship fails miserably it would seem.

busterarm 8y ago
I don't know about you, but I pretty much breezed through school and for the first 20 years of my life pretty much got nothing but praise from adults for how smart I was. Not once in that period did anyone really impart lessons of integrity and hard work. At best, I encountered adults (specifically, teachers) who went out of their way to impede my success, but I usually overcame that. Through that period of my life, I can count the number of people who had a positive influence on my personal development on one finger. I came into my early 20s a combative, arrogant asshole who couldn't really achieve anything and it took almost a decade and significant hardship (including brief periods of homelessness) to undo that. That's not to empathize with Holmes or her fraud, but if I have to be honest, a lot of the "intellectual elite" (in tech) that I encounter think that their shit doesn't stink. Edit: Oh yeah, this feels appropriate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEUh4FZIf8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEUh4FZIf8E
xapata 8y ago
Don't be so quick to categorize as wrong and mentally ill. People make odd choices all the time. Once you get set down a path, it's hard to change.
xevb3k 8y ago
It’s not that uncommon in my experience. I’ve met several people similar to those in Theranos management. It’s partly “fake it until you make it”, “double think” and a certain lack of understanding of the basic technology. And investors reward that behavior mostly investing in a persons connections and projected confidence. Theranos raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re by no means the only company like this. In fact, many of them do manage to fake it until they make it and become successful.

clearf 8y ago

An interesting side note about this story is the homogeneity and lack of relevant background among Theranos's board of directors. All the outside directors were white, prestigious (former generals, senators, cabinet secretaries, etc) and relatively old. Research shows that homogenous groups are less likely to challenge each other. My coauthor and I wrote about this in our book Meltdown (Published by Penguin Press in in March). We drew on Carreyrou's excellent reporting and some pretty interesting research about how team diversity affects decision making.

kumarvvr 8y ago
> Lack of relevant background among Theranos' board of directors Yeah, it's pretty clear that it was by design. Moreover, Holmes seems to have known the impossibility of her claims, or perhaps, was over confident initially about the possibilities of technology and later came to the realization that current technology cannot fulfill her vision. At that point, she should have come clean, but chose to continue the charades.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nyc111 8y ago

There is this popular Slicon Valley mantra: "Fake it till you make it" I'm wondering if she was trying to follow this mantra but she was stuck too deeply in the fake part.

timavr 8y ago

A little bit controversial, but without taking into account the way the company was run, the only big mistake was using inaccurate machines for testing and putting the people health at risk. Everything else is pretty standard SV startup stuff.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

It works both ways though, a lot of people said Tesla was a fraud and they couldn't build a "real" electric car with a range of 300 miles. And to the credit of the critics they weren't wrong, there was some serious integration of battery technology that had never been done before that made it possible for the Model S to exist. Not that I'm defending Theranos, they should have come out and said "We're running into issues" waaaaaay before they did and way before they put kiosks into Walgreens. That their diagnostic technique seemed impossible to experts doesn't disqualify them, but once they had failed to get it to work themselves, and yet assert that it does. That is when it steps over the line into fraud as far as I am concerned.

seandougall 8y ago
I feel like the comparison would work better if Tesla had secretly put gasoline engines in their cars before presenting them to the DOT and EPA. People may have accused them of being a fraud, but that’s not the same thing as accusing them of committing fraud.
buvanshak 8y ago
> there was some serious integration of battery technology that had never been done before that made it possible for the Model S to exist. Where can I read about this?
cepth 8y ago
I think the differentiator vs. Tesla is that Theranos promised things that are/were physically impossible. Putting aside Tesla's long history of delays, I think it's fair to say that the company has delivered on some of its core technological promises. Battery pack cost per kWh is close to dipping below $100, Tesla has dramatically reduced their use of rare earth metals in their packs, they've helped alleviate concerns around thermal runaway in their packs, and various academic and anecdotal accounts have shown that Tesla batterypacks hold up well even after hundreds of thousands of miles of road use and thousands of recharge cycles. These are all meaningful advancements in basic science. In the Carreyrou book, one clear example is the explanation of why Theranos couldn't possibly do "all blood tests" on a single drop of blood. On an individual test basis, finger pricked blood is different in chemical makeup from blood drawn from a vein. If you're testing for certain diseases, even assuming that you had equipment sensitive enough to find small concentrations of a target element or organism, the finger pricked blood may just not have those markers at all. Secondly, blood testing is a destructive process. If a doctor orders an immunoassay and a pathogen test for a patient, it's close to physically impossible to run both tests on Theranos's much touted "single drop of blood". You would be using up portions of an already tiny sample to perform the reactions necessary for each test. The premise that you could do multiple tests on a single drop of blood was a false one from the start. Third, the purported form factor of Theranos testing machines, a small Apple-esque box, created physics problems from the start. Proteins and cells in blood are hyper-sensitive to temperature. One of Elizabeth Holmes's subordinates literally repurposed a glue robot to perform the basic blood testing tasks that would normally be done by a human. Imagine trying to have a tiny robotic arm trying to pick up tubes of blood from a tray, and perform chemical reactions, all within a shoebox-sized machine. Trying to leave enough room for the robot to physically swing its arm, and maintaining an acceptable level of heat dissipation so as to not destroy the samples was a challenge that Theranos never solved. At a certain point, you're running up against basic laws of physics and the literal limitations of space.

timoth3y 8y ago

It's not unique to Theranos. It's all part of the perverse incentives involved with well-funded tech companies. There is no real incentive to call out fraud. As an investor or a partner you might pass on a deal, but to go public with your concerns means risking a possible lawsuit, raising the ire of the people who are already on the bandwagon, being excluded from future deals, and being dismissed as someone who is out of touch and "not getting it." Contrarians can short publicly-traded companies, so there is a financial incentive to call out BS, but for private companies there is very little upside in raising concerns publicly. If you doubt this effect, contrast the number of articles talking about how blockchain is the future with those taking a hard look at blockchain's financial viability for specific applications. The former group are the ones being asked to speak at conferences and landing large consulting contracts.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago
Short traders and put option holders have to also get the timeline and technical factors right to get paid. See the debacle with LongFin. The right play was to go long and make money off borrow fees. The bears got hosed by a trading freeze that kept them from closing their shorts or from acquiring shares to sell for their expiring put options.
- timoth3y 8y ago
  True. That's why so many of them try to "leak" the problem to journalists after they have taken their short positions. I mean it's not a perfect system, but at least in the public markets, there is some financial incentive to expose deception.
Torn 8y ago
I have a strong suspicion another example will be Magic Leap. Note: not as an intentionally-misleading or lying case, but just as another extremely well-funded startup whose launch is likely to fall short of the hype. $2.3bn in funding adds an immense pressure for it to be successful and perceived as revolutionary.
- 8y ago

transfire 8y ago

All the ballyhoo stunk to high heaven to me -- a case of "doth protest too much". So, my guess is the tech actually worked (even if not as perfect as originally hoped). And the company was destroyed by industry players via government regulation and a massive smear campaign -- and it worked like a charm. Ultimately they even murdered the lead scientist, faking his suicide, to ensure the truth is never known. The tech was simply too disruptive to the hand-over-fist $$$ in the industry, so it had to be put down. And if you think that's crazy, you haven't read enough history.

dralley 8y ago
You sound like someone who immediately dismissed "all the ballyhoo" because it wasn't what you wanted to believe. As someone who has followed the whole thing closely, Holmes and Balwani are snakes, and their fraud is undeniable. The tech is so "revolutionary" that they weren't even using it, they just hacked competitors machines to use smaller samples, accuracy rates be damned.
maxxxxx 8y ago
"And if you think that's crazy, you haven't read enough history. " I know! Just read the history of cold fusion and perpetual motion machines:. The establishment and government didn't allow these either :-)

sytelus 8y ago

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could have done it real easy by stepping aside, let someone inherit the mess and then selling her stack. In fact her board asked her to do just that before WSJ found out and she refused it. I have seen her plenty of talks/interviews and its super hard to believe she was working with malicious plan all along. Part of me wants to feel that her desire was genuine to some extent and she just hoped things would work out if she pulled lies and deception long enough to keep raising funds. She had lots of top tier advisors who have done exactly that to establish their own companies. I'm not defending her by any measure, she was classic bad manager with Balwani topping even her. There was a very little chance she could have actually ran talented team longer term - but this is precisely the part book conveniently leaves out.

TillE 8y ago
You start out with an idea you hope you can make work, you fudge a little and naively promise the moon, and soon enough (after a few big investments) you're in so deep there's no way out. Maybe you realize pretty quickly that the technology is a dud, but there's no exit without humiliation so you just keep digging. I don't think she's a sympathetic figure in any way, but it's easy to see how someone could wind up in that situation without having started out as a scammer.
- growlist 8y ago
  This makes sense to me, as I've asked myself was she bad or deluded? But perhaps instead she started out with the best intentions, only to be forced into gambling with ever greater stakes as each attempt at changing the world fell flat.
sametmax 8y ago
She probably believed in her project. You can't know if you are going to succeed when you try to achieve a revolutionary feat. But you have to act like you are sure you will. Imagine Jobs in an alternate universe, trying to get out the iPhone, but after years of failures and billions wasted, the world realize the product vision was unrealistic. Basically him being the same asshole, but hitting a wall many predicted. That would look the same as Theranos. The difference is that Job didn't fail. But he couldn't know that before trying and commit many people and resource to it. Imagine Elon failing as the Falcon X. Or worst, failing over and over until his company died because they lost control of one that went crashing into a school. Imagine Zuckerberg called out about all the privacy issues on FB before it actually made benefit. I would have died. When you try to achieve radical vision, you often either succeed as a hero or you fail as a vilain.

ousta 8y ago

Im gonna be downvoted for this but whatever. This would never have happened if Holmes was a man. America is so obsessed by its desire to empower minorities and woman especially that they will allow them to take risks or do things that no man on earth would be allowed to do hence playing with lives and healthcare at silicon valley scale and with billionare investors. The media is of course the first one to blame for this but also all the PC shit that people endure.

growlist 8y ago
From a certain feminist perspective this behaviour would be seen as reassuring in that it demonstrates women are just as capable of bad behaviour as men, and thus are equal.

pandacat 8y ago

Holmes can perhaps join IOTA, it's all the same: - Billion dollar valuation - Not working/Fake technology. - Intimidation against researcher and journalists.

Bakary 8y ago

What amazes me about things like this is that there are so many ways for relevant information to leak out but until revelations reach critical mass the fraud can continue unabated.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cuddlypsycho 8y ago

Elizabeth Holmes did not happen in a vacuum of course. She is a by-product of a culture that idolizes youth, raw enthusiasm, and passion over experience and pragmatism. Socially shaming and silencing her critics by branding them as old-fashioned, sexist and unsupportive of female CEOs in tech by the media did not help the situation either.

redleggedfrog 8y ago

What about the crazy eyes?! The first time I saw a picture of Holmes I thought, "That's got crazy bad written all over it. Stay...away..."

camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago

The hell am I doing working for money when I could just be lying to dumb rich people? Hey Richie Rich, I just invented a machine that cures bowell irregularity by whispering pleasant self-affirmations in your ear. "Relax, you are your body's destiny, release your burdens and fly free." I'll take my billion in cash, please.

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