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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must go to prison while she appeals sentence
- BMc2020 3y ago[flagged]
- JCM9 3y agoNot an ounce of sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes. She needs to go to prison. Now.
- asdfman123 3y agoAnd frankly, who cares about Elizabeth Holmes the person? Society is better off when we make a strong example by punishing frauds and con artists.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoIf there were an Elizabeth Holmes clone that had been punished 10 years prior for some similar con, would this Elizabeth Holmes have not become a con artist?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> would this Elizabeth Holmes have not become a con artist? Probably not. But she wouldn't have gotten the scale she had.
- chongli 3y agoI don’t think anything would have deterred her. She’s a psychopath. I would not have been surprised in the least if it had come out in the trial that she hired a hitman. The legal system has numerous functions. One of them is deterrence. Another one is rehabilitation. But one function a lot of people don’t like is retribution and simple removal. Removing dangerous people and frauds from the streets makes society safer at the margins. It’s an ugly business but I can’t see a way around it.
- selcuka 3y agoMaybe Elizabeth Holmes, that specific person, still would; but there would definitely be less con artists around. Currently being a con artist must have the highest reward/risk ratio among all professions.
- paxys 3y agoMaybe. Maybe not. We obviously can't predict individual cases, but in general the entire Silicon Valley "fake it till you make it" ethos was definitely responsible for how her life turned out. And I'm sure the Theranos case has directly led to at least some investors doing more due diligence and holding their founders more responsible for results (though sadly still not close to enough).
- plagiarist 3y agoI wish society would. Sometimes it seems like only those who defraud the wealthy get punished.
- xyst 3y agoUnfortunately these frauds and con artists are like weeds. Remove one and 3 more sprout in its place (ie, former CEO of WeWork, Neumann) In most cases the perpetrators do not even get jail time. Pay a fine and move on.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWhat fraud is Neumann guilty of?
- MPlus88 3y ago[dead]
- qotgalaxy 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- narrator 3y agoI think the most interesting thing about Liz's character is how she didn't skip a beat when she got indicted. She just kept rolling along. Kicked Sonny to the curb like it was nothing, tried and failed to blame the whole thing on him, found a rich guy to marry, had 2 kids and just kept trucking along like the whole fraud thing was just a big misunderstanding. The complete lack of empathy or concern for her victims, contrition or anything is amazing to watch. This lack of belief that she would ever be found out or anyone would care about her lack of concern for people was her downfall. She could have just bailed out before the Walgreens deal when the whole thing was obviously not going to work and failed in the normal way that science project startups fail. She could have then married the rich guy and had the two kids and lived a dull life maybe selling diet pills or whatever, but she just had to go all in to the fraud and wreck her life because she thought she could just power through on delusional belief alone.
- oceanghost 3y ago[flagged]
- ChrisHyung 3y ago[flagged]
- scrame 3y ago[flagged]
- p-e-w 3y ago> but she just had to go all in to the fraud and wreck her life because she thought she could just power through on delusional belief alone. ... which is actually a completely reasonable assumption from her perspective. People at her level of power being held accountable is the one-in-a-thousand exception. It almost never happens. In a very real sense, she was just extremely unlucky, and had undoubtedly witnessed countless others commit worse crimes without any negative consequences for them. This is also the answer to questions like "How did those cops think they could get away with murdering a man in cold blood while being filmed by half a dozen cameras?" It's easy: Because they had seen others get away with it, time and time again. Statistically speaking, a cop murdering an innocent citizen has about as much to fear as a regular guy parking in the wrong spot. Indictments are not the rule, never mind convictions.
- dbg31415 3y ago[flagged]
- revendell_elf 3y ago[dead]
- edgyquant 3y agoShe may be a sociopath, but I don’t think being pregnant is proof. Prison sucks and ten years is a long time: id probably try to gain sympathy points as well.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoShe had baby #2 as a strategic move to curry sympathy from the jury because "They don't put pretty people like me in jail".
- jjtheblunt 3y agoIs that quote from her?
- lern_too_spel 3y agohttps://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-sentencing-theranos-trial/card/elizabeth-holmes-brushed-off-patient-risks-they-don-t-put-pretty-people-like-me-in-jail--aqGc0srIBbZnuGAIsDJ4 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-sentencing...
- bandyaboot 3y agoWould you adopt children to gain sympathy points to avoid jail?
- edgyquant 3y agoMaybe not, but I come from the lower class where jail is just a normal thing that happens to people and everyone has friends who’ve been. If I were a woman from a fairly well off family I think having a baby for sympathy wouldn’t be that big of a stretch. I’ve seen people do strange things to try and get sympathy from a jury. Not adopt a child crazy, but being pregnant really doesn’t seem that odd to me and indeed seems like a common thing women facing extended prison time would do.
- sizzzzlerz 3y agoAbout time. She's another one I hope to not hear about for many years.
- photochemsyn 3y agoPrevious discussion and comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693855 I still think it's a bit tragic, if they'd just abandoned the quantitative claims and stuck to +/- detection strategies (suitable for Covid testing, STD detection, etc) they might have become something that we'd be talking about positively today, a hero of the Covid outbreak because they were all set up to do comprehensive testing. That's what microfluidic approaches with small samples are good for, detecting presence/absence of a marker within a defined limit of detection. Anyone with even basic domain knowledge would have known that the quantitative stuff couldn't be done on microfluidic samples... It's a really strange story, as they got all these military-government people on board, and that led to more trust from outside investors, and it just kept rolling... yet anyone like myself or dozens of others with experience in that field could have told them it was all BS if consulted. Go figure.
- carabiner 3y agoI think the microfluidic testing could have worked with ML and computer vision. I believe there was/is an Israeli startup working on it a few years after Theranos.
- changoplatanero 3y agoI heard that the reason why it can't be done is that to get those quantitative measurements you have to react the blood sample with certain chemicals. To do multiple tests you need enough blood that you can divide it up into samples and react each one separately. So if you only start off with one drop its hopeless to run the full suite of tests.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoNo, it is physically impossible to run quantitative tests on very small amounts of capillary blood. There have been studies (can dig them up but you can Google for them) that show that capillary blood simply is not homogenous enough at these one drop volumes. Meaning it doesn't matter how good your technology is, it's just not possible.
- 3y ago
- 1024core 3y agoI feel sorry for Sunny Balwani (OK, not too much, but just a little). Poor guy let his little head do the thinking and fell for her charms. Now he must pay almost $226M to people like Murdoch. He lost everything. Guy was well off from his previous startup(s), but I guess it's back to square one now. Hopefully he'll learn some survival skills in prison.
- tiahura 3y agoHe was like 37 and she was 18 when they met, right?
- PraetorianGourd 3y agoI want to assume best intention, but you have absolutely no reason to believe he was “thinking with his dick”. That is a rather sophomoric take.
- 1024core 3y agoSo why do you think he got involved?
- PraetorianGourd 3y agoMoney? Power? Ego? He is entirely capable of making his own decisions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 3y agoWhile her attempts to paint him as the mastermind rightly failed, he was _very_ much in on it. No sympathy whatsoever.
- causality0 3y agoYou know, the most dystopian thing isn't that a woman became rich by making fake medical test machines. It's that she was prosecuted for screwing over other rich people, not the negligent murder of an unknown number of poor people due to deliberately faked medical tests.
- victor9000 3y agoFor me it's the fact that these restitution orders are exclusively to corporations and investors, while the blood tests all originated from real people having real diseases needing real treatment. It's safe to say many of these patients suffered adverse effects in one way or another, yet sociopathic capitalism rules the day.
- myspeed 3y agoshe will be back from prison as a billioaire
- nate_meurer 3y agoMy favorite thing about Elizabeth Holmes is what she said to NYT reporter Amy Chozick when Amy mentioned that Jennifer Lawrence had declined to play Holmes in The Dropout: > They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created. When Ms. Choszick asked why she would do such a thing, Elizabeth said, > I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn’t have good technical ideas. Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes... This bitch is as pure and distilled a psychopath as we are ever likely to see.
- abrax3141 3y agoDoes someone have a link to the appeals court response to her pleading?
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoFor someone in Europe (and therefore having a distant relationship with this scandal, but still interested), how is the series The Dropout? Is it relatively objective and close to the facts? Or a sensationalized drama without much value?
- fryman 3y agoI can’t speak to the Hulu series, but the abc podcast was pretty fact-based and what the show mostly pulls from. I’d at least recommend the podcast.
- wdr1 3y agoI don't know why, but I'm still surprised the voice was totally fake. Before her downfall I thought it was some type of strange misogyny to accuse her of that. A lot of it was still misogyny, but turns out that part was right.