Did the company actually believe that the breakthrough could be made? That is a huge distinction between a scam and a scientific experiment that did not yield p

Did the company actually believe that the breakthrough could be made? That is a huge distinction between a scam and a scientific experiment that did not yield positive results. It did become an outright scam after a while, though. Moral of the story: don't mess with extremely rich people's money unless you yourself are also extremely rich.