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> The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers. This is not the most amazing thing, at all. I
by edanm 8y ago
> The media, though, never paid enough attention (or was possibly subverted by Theranos itself) to the naysayers.
This is not the most amazing thing, at all. I'm not surprised that "the media" with their limited access, didn't get the full story.
Rather, I'm more surprised about the informed investors, who invested a lot of money, and had access or at least the ability to push for it. How did they invest so much money in something with seemingly so little backing?
> 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.
I don't disagree with the sentiment about the media, but I think this is a singularly bad example - who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here.
- rjkennedy98 8y agoMy brother who is a pre-med student was able to figure out that Theranos was full of it without any special access way before the media broke the story. When Stanford Professor John Ioannidis refuses to join your board because he refuses to give your product credibility that is a HUGE red flag.
- twoodfin 8y agoIt's unfortunate that your brother and others couldn't publicly trade on this knowledge. That simultaneously would have made a ton of money and disseminated through the market the valuable information that folks were betting megabucks that Theranos was full of it, limiting their fraudulent climb into the stratosphere. This is a long way of saying that we may have created too many disincentives for large companies to IPO.
- Ibai0tha 8y agoOr prediction markets that investors could use as a second opinion to get a corrective input on their own views. If you invest 100M you might as well throw another 10k at a prediction market if you're confident in yours and there are naysayers who would bet against you.
- buttcoinslol 8y agoThese are called financial derivatives.
- vkou 8y agoEven if you know that a company is a pure scam, the market can remain irrational longer then you can cover your short.
- inetknght 8y ago> who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here. I beg to differ. Straight from the article: > Some patients were rushed to a hospital on the basis of erroneous readings, only to be sent home when their blood was properly analyzed by the hospital. Even worse, Theranos was using brutal intimidation tactics against its own employees to stop the truth from coming out. I don't know about your location but American citizens pay quite a premium for hospital care. Imagine the potential for crippling debt all because of a test result which should have been known to produce false positives. That's definitely the public losing money here.
- edanm 8y agoYou're right - I stand corrected. I wasn't aware they'd gotten quite that far in actually deploying their product and (supposedly) testing people.
- inetknght 8y agoThat's rather the whole point of the Theranos drama. They had faked tests on real people. That repercussions for third parties (CVS/Walgreens comes to mind, you can easily search for the fallout from that), and all sorts of very not-fun stuff.
- grigjd3 8y agoIt is cute that you think investors are informed.