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Elizabeth Holmes 'gave me gobbledygook answers' back in 2014
- no_wizard 4y agoI was having a weird time getting the link to work, but its on the wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221021205719/https://finance.yahoo.com/web/20221021205719/https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ken-auletta-john-carreyrou-did-a-brilliant-job-of-exposing-elizabeth-holmes-201833760.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221021205719/https://finance.y... In case anyone else was having an issue
- smegsicle 4y agoyou mean https://web.archive.org/web/20221022001339/https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ken-auletta-john-carreyrou-did-a-brilliant-job-of-exposing-elizabeth-holmes-201833760.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221022001339/https://finance.y...
- systemvoltage 4y agoYea in retrospect this is easy to say and it is trivial to join the dots, but the real leg work was done by John Carreyrou. He single-handedly investigated, recognized the fraud and exposed Theranos when everyone was writing rosy stories about Elizabeth Holmes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carreyrou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carreyrou > He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal. Highly recommend reading his book that gives a detailed account on how he went about taking on Theranos: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood
- bigmattystyles 4y ago>> Yea in retrospect this is easy to say and it is trivial to join the dots And it likely is happening again, someone who is being heralded now will be exposed and we'll go through this important exercise again. My money is on Musk's number coming up.
- bluepizza 4y agoFar from me to defend Musk as a person, but Tesla cars are in the streets, SpaceX rockets are launched regularly, and Starlink is used by millions.
- mhermher 4y agoThis has nothing to do with what they said. Completely irrelevant to the question at hand.
- bluepizza 4y agoWhat is the question at hand?
- metadat 4y agoHistory doesn't repeat itself; instead, future events rhyme with those of the past.
- thebooktocome 4y agoAnd we’ll have full-self driving any day now. /s
- Volundr 4y ago
- anigbrowl 4y agoThere was that Nikola CEO who was recently convicted of defrauding investors with overly-rosy stories about the company's electric semi-trucks: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-electric-trucks-guilty-fraud https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele... It is a pity that charlatanry seems so profitable of late. It's always been around and in some respects you can admire a con artist's cleverness, but to me there's a difference between fleecing some investors looking to make a quick buck and trying to do the same to the public.
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- AlexandrB 4y agoI love some of the crazy stuff[1] that happened inside Theranos in response to Carreyrou's reporting. > Theranos employees once reportedly chanted, “Fuck you, Carreyrou,” at an all-hands meeting in October of 2015. > At a company party, Theranos employees played a video game modeled after Atari's Space Invaders: The gun was the miniLab, the bullets the nanotainers and the invader being shot at: Yours Truly! I know it's fashionable to hate the press, but when it escalates to this level of vitriol it smells of "The lady doth protest too much". [1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/13/17234844/theranos-space-invaders-clone-video-game-john-carreyrou https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/13/17234844/theranos-sp...
- systemvoltage 4y agoI think this is more of an indictment of the rest of journalism than Theranos. He was swimming against all other journalists who were raving about Elizabeth Holmes. How could you not!? She is charismatic, a woman, and young MIT dropout. We need more journalists like John. There is a shortage of journalists that would stand up for facts even if that meant going against the whole world.
- bane 4y agoI feel like Carreyrou was the first to popularize that there was something up with Theranos and Holmes. Being a journalist he also did it with direct sources. But the feeling that something was "wrong" predates him by a while, there's some really insightful comments here on HN circa 2013-2014 that seem to smell fishiness. Some of the comments back then point very specifically to the weirdness of her board and the near impossibility of the tech. It seemed to tick up really sharply in late 2015, which seems to be when Carreyrou decided to pick up the story. This started coinciding with Holmes going on publicity tours talking about new partnerships she had brokered with various pharmacies and other companies. I don't really think it hit the general public consciousness until mid 2016 when the wheels really started coming off. By then Carreyrou really just seemed to be a public face for a lot of people who had more or less figured it out -- except he was really trying to get at the bottom of the "why" it felt bad.
- systemvoltage 4y agoNope, Carreyrou was on it before it was public that Carreyrou was on it. He spent months talking to people privately. Read the book. There is so much amiss here. Edit, responding to comment below: Of course people inside Theranos knew about something fishy, a few people outside were rumouring about it. But the suggestion that Carreyrou "jumped" on it in 2015 is false. Completely.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> Nope, Carreyrou was on it before it was public that Carreyrou was on it. This doesn't preclude other people independently suspecting something was wrong. Indeed, many of the people Carreyrou talked to thought something smelled fishy. People in the original HN threads thought so too, as did Phyllis Gartner.
- eaurouge 4y agoHe should get credit for investigating and building a story around it. But there were calls from the scientific community, and in discussions here on HN, for Theranos to open up and show their data, way before he started investigating. The fact that Silicon Valley VCs, with one notable exception, passed on investing, speaks for itself.
- SilverBirch 4y agoI mean... I feel like this has been done to death. Way back when Holmes was at Stanford she proposed stuff similar to what she was doing to Phyllis Gardner (a respected professor at Stanford) and Gardner's response was basically "what you're proposing is not phsyically possible." The second half of Ken's statement is the real meat of this: he was skeptical, but John produced the goods. And that's the crux of it. It's one thing to say "Hey, this self-driving car thing seems a bit far-fetched." It's quite a different thing to get the engineers working on it to admit that the facts are untrue. (Not saying that's the case, just a likely example).
- anm89 4y agoDid this person clearly state this when it happened in 2014? If not, they failed as a journalist, and then to try to bring this up after the fraud was known to get credit is even worse.
- mgraczyk 4y agoThat's basically what this article is about. > “John Carreyrou did a brilliant job of exposing Elizabeth Holmes — I did not.” Auletta reflected. “So, when I look back on that, yeah, I did a profile of her, but I did not produce the goods that he did.”
- pxmpxm 4y agoI mean it's the New York Times, a story about female STEM start up founder is essentially an identity politics version of crack to them.
- zone411 4y agoThe New Yorker, not the New York Times.
- pxmpxm 4y agoAh definitely misread it, thought I vaguely remember Forbes and/or NYT being the cheerleaders at the time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- advisedwang 4y agoIt was not really a flattering profile. Give it a read before you assume: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
- advisedwang 4y agoTheir piece [1] is pretty skeptical of Theranos. All of Theranos claims are quoted as claims, not fact. The article explicitly says Theranos doesn't say how they are achieving what they want, details a lack of independent evidence in support of their claims and quotes competitors explaining problems in Theranos' claims. He makes it clear that Holmes was a charismatic "big claims" type person. He didn't blow the case open, but reported on it as well as he could have, given libel laws. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
- nullc 4y ago"First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.", then again the guy that coined that saying has been taking paid speaking gigs to promote a conman pretending to be Bitcoin's creator so ... ::SHRUGS::
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> "First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud." Maybe for a journalist with an organization backing them (paying the legal expenses), but generally speaking people aren't ethically obliged to pick legal fights with those richer and more powerful than them.
- nullc 4y agoIn the sense that no one is pretty much ever obligated to come to the aid of another legally, sure. But ethically? I'm less sure about about that. The willingness of people to do the right thing at their own risk for the benefit of others is part of what makes civilization work. And if your failure to remark might be seen by others as approval, then I think it can rise to an ethical obligation. If you become known for being competent about anything in particular it can be hard to avoid situations where you silence isn't seen as approval.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoAny system of ethics which obliges you to disregard your own wellbeing is a death cult. Are you ethically obliged to throw yourself in front of a trolley to save several other people? If you think so, you've been indoctrinated into a death cult.
- nullc 4y agoCome on. I hope you don't think that not failing to call out nonsense when your inaction will make other people get defrauded is the same as literally being killed by a trolley. Why even reply on HN? It may be adverse to your wellbeing in the future, and doesn't confer any particular benefit to you today.
- fred_is_fred 4y agoFake it until you make it has long been the ethos of SV startups, where in the dust people lose money and jobs. Theranos took this a step further and actively harmed people's health, giving invalid cancer diagnoses for example. She should be in jail for a long time for what she did to people.
- labrador 4y agoIt still boggles my mind that there were a lot of people in that company who knew but didn't say anything. I'd love to know why.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoGreater fool theory? The era of cheap money?
- maxbond 4y agoFrom the interviews I've listened to it seems like people were given the impression that the mission of the company was sincere, and that Holmes was gifted at making people feel as if their concerns had been heard and making them feel like the company would be an eventual success. The film Fyre Fraud might interest you. The subjects discuss how they felt pressured to "make it work" at Fyre Festival (a different fraud) even as they understood the window of possibility was rapidly diminishing.
- geoduck14 4y agoHere's my theory: Elizabeth was charged with Investor Fraud - which probably means she told investors "here is a product that is awesome" The employees knew they had the product and had various vantage points about how well it worked - but none of them knew what promises Elizabeth was making or how poorly the entire product performed