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I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos. It's funny to think back to 2015 and

I'm loving reading through all of the sickening puff pieces that business/tech journalists put out about her and Theranos. It's funny to think back to 2015 and the hagiographical void still left in tech journo hearts after Steve Jobs died. https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-icons.html https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-i... > How Elizabeth Holmes Became America's New Entrepreneurial Icon > She represents the part of entrepreneurship that is long-term dedication, when nobody's watching >... That kind of walk-before-you-talk behavior is refreshing and respectable in today's hype-strewn entrepreneurial landscape.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Gell-Man Amnesia Effect in full effect. Will we remember when we read the next PR piece/pump and dump disguised as journalism?
- johnebgd 5y ago
  No one in the media seems to still question if cryptocurrencies are serious investment assets despite little actual proven utility beyond being a speculative investment asset.
  - caslon 5y ago
    >Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud >Speculators might make money on it, but the arguments for its usefulness fail completely. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is... >Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history >It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocu... >The Great Cryptocurrency Scam https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-great-cryptocurrency-scam/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-grea... >Dogecoin Creator Says Crypto Is a Scam >Jackson Palmer went on Twitter for the first time in two years to remind us that the wealthy are ruining everything—even cryptocurrency. https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1847292956 https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1...
    - johnebgd 5y ago
      Articles you cited are from years ago or a contributor (not an employee) of Forbes. I met Jackson Palmer in 2017/2018 and he had a level head for looking through this mania. Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.
      - caslon 5y ago
        The first one was from under a year ago.
      - brianobush 5y ago
        > Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy. OT, but why would Tether impact Bitcoin? They are totally different use cases of crypto.
        antishatter 5y ago
        The market structure allows tether to be printed and then to pump Bitcoin. So it doesn’t matter what the use case is.
  - ekanes 5y ago
    I’d like to bet someone on this. If you or others are interested maybe we can refine a wager. :) I’m thinking that in 7 years there will be something built with blockchain tech (not cryptocurrency) that is used by 10M people? (I know you said cryptocurrencies but many people conflate the two and feel it’s all bogus..)
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      Anyone could win instantly by pointing out git. The hype is new, but not the concept.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Is git fueled by superfluous energy-wasting (=environment-destroying) "proof of work"?!?
        ilikepi 5y ago
        There's a decent amount of bike-shedding over which workflow is the best, and that is a sort of inefficient "fuel" for git as a tool at some level...
      - Cederfjard 5y ago
        What definition do you have of blockchain tech that git fits into it?
        throwawaylinux 5y ago
        From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain "A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography.[1][2][3][4] Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). [etc]" Do you have a definition that git doesn't fit into (without getting too pedantic, e.g., git being a DAG of records rather than a list)?
- deepsun 5y ago
  Well, some icons are half-lying/half-BSing/half-actually doing cool stuff. Will we remember their lies? PS: you know who I'm talking about, just don't want to invite fans here.
- potta_coffee 5y ago
  I remember thinking that all the hype about her was somewhat over the top.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    I was going through a health tech startup incubator at the time, and it became a bit of a meme where we'd poke fun at anyone who bought into Theranos. Some went as far as putting together a slide deck to debunk the claims about running labs on such tiny volumes of blood. This was when and where I learned about the heterogeneity of blood.
    - erosenbe0 5y ago
      It was an obvious farce. If they had real tech they could have simply done a million comparative tests on the military/VA or at free clinics and showed the relative accuracy.
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        Yeah it was surprising that so many people with health care backgrounds fell for it.
- jondwillis 5y ago
  you turn the page, and you forget.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I got conned by pump and dump stock scam. The perpetrators got sentenced to 5 years. I was amazed to get a restitution check in the mail. I hope to be smarter next time.
  - smarks 5y ago
    Wow, that is amazing! What portion of your investment was returned? You don't have to say the actual amounts if you don't want, but I'm curious about whether you got 1/10, 1/2, or all of your investment back.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Actually, all of it! (It wasn't a large amount, though.)
- r00fus 5y ago
  I will never forgive Bloomberg for their atrocious handling of Apple/Amazon/Supermicro "hacking" case where they didn't retract their claims despite no proof or evidence. I never cite that publication, it's toxic to me.
  - throwtheacctawy 5y ago
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  No of course not, we as a society do not learn from history very well. It's not like this woman is the first con man ever to defraud investors. And she won't be the last.
pram 5y ago
"If you haven't yet heard of Elizabeth Holmes, you soon will." And how!
- clessg 5y ago
  If you just stop reading right there, the article is perfectly cromulent!
  - notyourwork 5y ago
    TIL the word cromulent, cheers.
    - cromulent 5y ago
      Checking in.
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      HN, embiggening your vocabulary day by day.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    For those curious on cromulent: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-cromulent-mean https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-crom...
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > All of which is great fodder for flashy headlines. Yes... Something like that.
bb101 5y ago
I do feel sorry for her in a way. She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off. Even TED has removed her talk from YouTube. What responsibility do the media bear when their shallow hype turns out to be false and damaging to all parties?
- some_random 5y ago
  Nah you shouldn't feel bad for her, if you read into it she was constantly lying from the very beginning. As for media responsibility, I don't know how responsible they really are here for the actual fraud. While Holmes sent their stories of her to investors, she also had fake documents and other lies that made the bulk of her pitch (ie the military work).
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  > She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off. She absolutely was not. It was completely obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the subject that what she was doing was fraudulent.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I have no knowledge of the subject. I do, however, have a strong allergic reaction to motivational speeches from wide-eyed people with enormous grins. Well, from anyone; but the wide eyes and the permanent grin (and the embarrassing grooving-along to MC Hammer) would have driven me away from that firm in an instant. I'm amazed that anyone fell for her.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  > riding a treadmill of expectations ... which she started up herself. Read about the Stanford prof who saw through her before she even started the Theranos journey.
biztos 5y ago
> She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day. -- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, yes that Andreessen, writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure. Turns out Palantir's Alex Karp was also "harnessing goodness through technology." No idea how she missed Adam Neumann. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/elizabeth-holmes-tech-visionaries-brian-chesky.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/el... [Edit: there is an implied conflict of interest in the spouse of a major venture capitalist hyping startups in a supposedly neutral publication, which is something I'm kind of surprised needs clarification, but there is also an explicit conflict of interest -- if we treat the author as a journalist anyway -- in that one of the five companies thus hyped in the linked article was an A16Z portfolio company. Sorry to anyone who thought I was implying that the Andreessens or A16Z were investors in Theranos, I assumed they were not and I didn't intend to imply that. Nor do I think it is in fact implied, but I obviously should have been clearer since people took it that way.]
- Grustaf 5y ago
  A16z didn't invest in Theranos, did Marc personally invest or what is the conflict?
  - biztos 5y ago
    The article hypes five founders, one definitely was funded by A16Z, the others I think were not but I'm not sure. I don't know anything about the Andreessens' personal investments but just as a general rule you might question the propriety of someone that close to the VC money using your storied newspaper to promote startup founders. I'm not going to hold up the NYT as some bastion of journalistic ethics, but still. https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-company-airbnb-2/ https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-compan...
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      Hyping founders you _didn't_ invest in is sort of the opposite of nepotism though.
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
It is funny that TED has removed her talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE
__coaxialcabal 5y ago
A hagiography (/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος, hagios 'holy', and -γραφία, -graphia 'writing') or vita (from Latin vita, life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
LOL, um, you are on a silicon valley startup site? The valuations of practically every company that comes out of here until it "goes public" is almost entirely based on this hype media infrastructure, or at least are dependent on somewhere between four and eight 0s in those company's valuations. This is a parable about sociopaths in society. They are tolerable as long as they are usable fools: useful for war, useful for flogging troops, play within certain rules. But there's a line, and you cross it, you risk revealing all the other vampire sociopaths that are controlling society. I have no sympathy for this postmodern uncanny valley AI-generated faildaughter CEO person-like matrix construct with empty, flaccid eyes. But she's a fascinating mirror into the CEO sausage factory.
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Agree. And it was further shameful how the hype machine may have utilized her gender to try and portray her to young women and girls as a role model. When there are plenty of female CEO ushering in successful products like Dr. Lisa Su or whomever.
hidudeurcool 5y ago

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Gell-Man Amnesia Effect in full effect. Will we remember when we read the next PR piece/pump and dump disguised as journalism?

johnebgd 5y ago
No one in the media seems to still question if cryptocurrencies are serious investment assets despite little actual proven utility beyond being a speculative investment asset.
- caslon 5y ago
  >Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud >Speculators might make money on it, but the arguments for its usefulness fail completely. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is... >Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history >It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocurrency-mining-pump-dump-fraud-ico-value https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17275202/bitcoin-scam-cryptocu... >The Great Cryptocurrency Scam https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-great-cryptocurrency-scam/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jayadkisson/2018/11/20/the-grea... >Dogecoin Creator Says Crypto Is a Scam >Jackson Palmer went on Twitter for the first time in two years to remind us that the wealthy are ruining everything—even cryptocurrency. https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1847292956 https://gizmodo.com/dogecoin-creator-says-crypto-is-a-scam-1...
  - johnebgd 5y ago
    Articles you cited are from years ago or a contributor (not an employee) of Forbes. I met Jackson Palmer in 2017/2018 and he had a level head for looking through this mania. Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy.
    - caslon 5y ago
      The first one was from under a year ago.
    - brianobush 5y ago
      > Even the Tether fraud hasn’t stopped the Bitcoin buying frenzy. OT, but why would Tether impact Bitcoin? They are totally different use cases of crypto.
      - antishatter 5y ago
        The market structure allows tether to be printed and then to pump Bitcoin. So it doesn’t matter what the use case is.
- ekanes 5y ago
  I’d like to bet someone on this. If you or others are interested maybe we can refine a wager. :) I’m thinking that in 7 years there will be something built with blockchain tech (not cryptocurrency) that is used by 10M people? (I know you said cryptocurrencies but many people conflate the two and feel it’s all bogus..)
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    Anyone could win instantly by pointing out git. The hype is new, but not the concept.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Is git fueled by superfluous energy-wasting (=environment-destroying) "proof of work"?!?
      - ilikepi 5y ago
        There's a decent amount of bike-shedding over which workflow is the best, and that is a sort of inefficient "fuel" for git as a tool at some level...
    - Cederfjard 5y ago
      What definition do you have of blockchain tech that git fits into it?
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain "A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography.[1][2][3][4] Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). [etc]" Do you have a definition that git doesn't fit into (without getting too pedantic, e.g., git being a DAG of records rather than a list)?
deepsun 5y ago
Well, some icons are half-lying/half-BSing/half-actually doing cool stuff. Will we remember their lies? PS: you know who I'm talking about, just don't want to invite fans here.
potta_coffee 5y ago
I remember thinking that all the hype about her was somewhat over the top.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  I was going through a health tech startup incubator at the time, and it became a bit of a meme where we'd poke fun at anyone who bought into Theranos. Some went as far as putting together a slide deck to debunk the claims about running labs on such tiny volumes of blood. This was when and where I learned about the heterogeneity of blood.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    It was an obvious farce. If they had real tech they could have simply done a million comparative tests on the military/VA or at free clinics and showed the relative accuracy.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      Yeah it was surprising that so many people with health care backgrounds fell for it.
jondwillis 5y ago
you turn the page, and you forget.
WalterBright 5y ago
I got conned by pump and dump stock scam. The perpetrators got sentenced to 5 years. I was amazed to get a restitution check in the mail. I hope to be smarter next time.
- smarks 5y ago
  Wow, that is amazing! What portion of your investment was returned? You don't have to say the actual amounts if you don't want, but I'm curious about whether you got 1/10, 1/2, or all of your investment back.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Actually, all of it! (It wasn't a large amount, though.)
r00fus 5y ago
I will never forgive Bloomberg for their atrocious handling of Apple/Amazon/Supermicro "hacking" case where they didn't retract their claims despite no proof or evidence. I never cite that publication, it's toxic to me.
- throwtheacctawy 5y ago
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
No of course not, we as a society do not learn from history very well. It's not like this woman is the first con man ever to defraud investors. And she won't be the last.

pram 5y ago

"If you haven't yet heard of Elizabeth Holmes, you soon will." And how!

clessg 5y ago
If you just stop reading right there, the article is perfectly cromulent!
- notyourwork 5y ago
  TIL the word cromulent, cheers.
  - cromulent 5y ago
    Checking in.
  - teh_klev 5y ago
    HN, embiggening your vocabulary day by day.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  For those curious on cromulent: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-cromulent-mean https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-crom...
tentacleuno 5y ago
> All of which is great fodder for flashy headlines. Yes... Something like that.

bb101 5y ago

I do feel sorry for her in a way. She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off. Even TED has removed her talk from YouTube. What responsibility do the media bear when their shallow hype turns out to be false and damaging to all parties?

some_random 5y ago
Nah you shouldn't feel bad for her, if you read into it she was constantly lying from the very beginning. As for media responsibility, I don't know how responsible they really are here for the actual fraud. While Holmes sent their stories of her to investors, she also had fake documents and other lies that made the bulk of her pitch (ie the military work).
light_hue_1 5y ago
> She was riding a treadmill of expectations. Started off slowly, probably thinking "yeah, we can do this" and by the time the treadmill was moving at light speed, it was too late to get off. She absolutely was not. It was completely obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the subject that what she was doing was fraudulent.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I have no knowledge of the subject. I do, however, have a strong allergic reaction to motivational speeches from wide-eyed people with enormous grins. Well, from anyone; but the wide eyes and the permanent grin (and the embarrassing grooving-along to MC Hammer) would have driven me away from that firm in an instant. I'm amazed that anyone fell for her.
AlbertCory 5y ago
> riding a treadmill of expectations ... which she started up herself. Read about the Stanford prof who saw through her before she even started the Theranos journey.

biztos 5y ago

> She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day. -- Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, yes that Andreessen, writing in the New York Times Magazine about Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs with, um, no conflict of interest whatsoever I'm sure. Turns out Palantir's Alex Karp was also "harnessing goodness through technology." No idea how she missed Adam Neumann. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/elizabeth-holmes-tech-visionaries-brian-chesky.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/12/t-magazine/el... [Edit: there is an implied conflict of interest in the spouse of a major venture capitalist hyping startups in a supposedly neutral publication, which is something I'm kind of surprised needs clarification, but there is also an explicit conflict of interest -- if we treat the author as a journalist anyway -- in that one of the five companies thus hyped in the linked article was an A16Z portfolio company. Sorry to anyone who thought I was implying that the Andreessens or A16Z were investors in Theranos, I assumed they were not and I didn't intend to imply that. Nor do I think it is in fact implied, but I obviously should have been clearer since people took it that way.]

Grustaf 5y ago
A16z didn't invest in Theranos, did Marc personally invest or what is the conflict?
- biztos 5y ago
  The article hypes five founders, one definitely was funded by A16Z, the others I think were not but I'm not sure. I don't know anything about the Andreessens' personal investments but just as a general rule you might question the propriety of someone that close to the VC money using your storied newspaper to promote startup founders. I'm not going to hold up the NYT as some bastion of journalistic ethics, but still. https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-company-airbnb-2/ https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-compan...
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Hyping founders you _didn't_ invest in is sort of the opposite of nepotism though.

cscurmudgeon 5y ago

It is funny that TED has removed her talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE

__coaxialcabal 5y ago

A hagiography (/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος, hagios 'holy', and -γραφία, -graphia 'writing') or vita (from Latin vita, life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

LOL, um, you are on a silicon valley startup site? The valuations of practically every company that comes out of here until it "goes public" is almost entirely based on this hype media infrastructure, or at least are dependent on somewhere between four and eight 0s in those company's valuations. This is a parable about sociopaths in society. They are tolerable as long as they are usable fools: useful for war, useful for flogging troops, play within certain rules. But there's a line, and you cross it, you risk revealing all the other vampire sociopaths that are controlling society. I have no sympathy for this postmodern uncanny valley AI-generated faildaughter CEO person-like matrix construct with empty, flaccid eyes. But she's a fascinating mirror into the CEO sausage factory.

erosenbe0 5y ago
Agree. And it was further shameful how the hype machine may have utilized her gender to try and portray her to young women and girls as a role model. When there are plenty of female CEO ushering in successful products like Dr. Lisa Su or whomever.

hidudeurcool 5y ago