4 ms·

I 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

I 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
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- ChrisHyung 3y ago
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scrame 3y ago
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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.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  Her father was an executive at Enron, so I’m sure she’s familiar with corporate accountability.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Enron wasn't just a one-in-a-thousand exception, it was a one-in-a-million exception. You have to go back to the early 20th century to find another case of the government coming down this hard on a large company, and it certainly hasn't happened again since. The standard process for many decades now is that a company caught committing crimes pays a certain amount of money (nowhere near enough to threaten its existence in any way), and then can continue operating essentially as before.
    - graeme 3y ago
      Enron wasn’t a regular business caught committing crimes. The entire thing was fraud. There was no business left to operate. Same as Theranos. It was fraud. It is a massive mistake to conflate stuff regular companies do which may be illegal or distasteful, with companies that are entirely fraudulent.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        Almost every Diesel vehicle Volkswagen produced for many years was fraud. The company designed those vehicles, with criminal intent, to deceive regulators (and customers!) into believing the product was something that it actually wasn't. How is that different from what Theranos did? Theranos fraudulently claimed their blood test was capable of quantifying various factors. It wasn't. Volkswagen fraudulently claimed their cars were capable of meeting emissions standards. They weren't. Yet Volkswagen is still allowed to operate, even though their business ran on fraud for a long time.
        ajmurmann 3y ago
        VW's cars existed and were drivable. In fact owners of their cars were probably pretty happy with the product they had purchased till the scandal emerged. Theranos' product never worked in any way that anyone, consumer or regulator would have deemed acceptable. VW has other products than their diesel cars. Theranos had nothing but the non-functioning diagnostic.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Yeah, honestly, like a lot of cases like Holmes, for me the worst part is not the fraud, it's the complete willingness to completely ruin anyone that gets in her way that makes her so diabolical. The book Bad Blood makes it pretty clear how she pretty much threatened to destroy anyone that did the simple act of telling the truth. Her subsequent disregard for patients, Sonny as you put it, and heck her 2 kids in my opinion show how much she just does not care about other people.
- tasuki 3y ago
  The other stuff, sure, but how do her two kids show she doesn't care about other people?
  - haneefmubarak 3y ago
    IIUC the GP's argument is that she active sought to have children after being charged primarily for the purpose of attempting to sway the courts and the public opinion lest that fail — without any consideration on the effects her actions might have on those children.
option 3y ago
regarding her victims. She has only been convicted for defrauding powerful investors like Shultz, Murdoch, Kissinger, etc. who failed to do due diligence. She has not been convicted for defrauding customers/patients or her employees. Tells much about current state of justice system… Well at least she was stopped.
- RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
  "That most heinous of crimes, theft of money [from rich people]."
- impute 3y ago
  The same thing happened with the Fyre Festival. The organizers didn't face consequences from defrauding the people they sold tickets to. They face consequences from defrauding the investors.
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago
  That's why they put the hammer down on Bernie Madoff - he stole from the ultra wealthy. If he had been robbing the little people he would have, at most, spent a couple of years at Club Fed.
- sigstoat 3y ago
  how much effort should the prosecutors spend on prosecuting more challenging charges, when they had a bunch of easy ones? are they morally obligated to prosecute every single charge that might apply?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I hate this take because I hear it all the time and it's simply incorrect, at least in relation to Holmes' case. In a court of law you need to prove your case, with evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence that Holmes lied to investors for the purposes of getting money, and that she knew she was lying and did it purposefully, was undeniable - there were too many smoking guns. The evidence that she knew she was defrauding patients was always less clear cut. Besides, the prosecutors did try mightily to convict her of crimes against patients. Are you saying the 12 randomly selected jurors who found her not guilty of these crimes are in cahoots with "the current state of the justice system"?
paulpauper 3y ago
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. how would that have worked? it was a fraud before then.
jb1991 3y ago
And[0]: > Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly told a Walgreens consultant that “They don’t put pretty people like me in jail,” according to a government filing ahead of the sentencing hearing Friday. The arrogance. https://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...
- postsantum 3y ago
  It works most of the time but sometimes the system malfunctiones A similar story: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U
  - jb1991 3y ago
    In case you or other readers here don't know, the link is satire (fake).
swalling 3y ago
The prevalence of psychopathy is significantly higher among white collar managers than the general population (4% vs. 1% according to one of the few empirical studies https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.925 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.925) Holmes, unlike most nonviolent corporate psychopaths, is only going to jail because she violated one of the only real cardinal rules of late stage capitalism, which is don’t intentionally defraud investors. She’s also one of the few psychopaths dumb enough to publicly and directly admit that she was maintaining a charade of a person who believes that other people and their emotions truly exist.
- tasuki 3y ago
  > publicly and directly admit that she was maintaining a charade of a person who believes that other people and their emotions truly exist Source?
  - swalling 3y ago
    From https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes...: At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes is a textbook psychopath, i.e. "deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/

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.

pyuser583 3y ago
Her father was an executive at Enron, so I’m sure she’s familiar with corporate accountability.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Enron wasn't just a one-in-a-thousand exception, it was a one-in-a-million exception. You have to go back to the early 20th century to find another case of the government coming down this hard on a large company, and it certainly hasn't happened again since. The standard process for many decades now is that a company caught committing crimes pays a certain amount of money (nowhere near enough to threaten its existence in any way), and then can continue operating essentially as before.
  - graeme 3y ago
    Enron wasn’t a regular business caught committing crimes. The entire thing was fraud. There was no business left to operate. Same as Theranos. It was fraud. It is a massive mistake to conflate stuff regular companies do which may be illegal or distasteful, with companies that are entirely fraudulent.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      Almost every Diesel vehicle Volkswagen produced for many years was fraud. The company designed those vehicles, with criminal intent, to deceive regulators (and customers!) into believing the product was something that it actually wasn't. How is that different from what Theranos did? Theranos fraudulently claimed their blood test was capable of quantifying various factors. It wasn't. Volkswagen fraudulently claimed their cars were capable of meeting emissions standards. They weren't. Yet Volkswagen is still allowed to operate, even though their business ran on fraud for a long time.
      - ajmurmann 3y ago
        VW's cars existed and were drivable. In fact owners of their cars were probably pretty happy with the product they had purchased till the scandal emerged. Theranos' product never worked in any way that anyone, consumer or regulator would have deemed acceptable. VW has other products than their diesel cars. Theranos had nothing but the non-functioning diagnostic.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Yeah, honestly, like a lot of cases like Holmes, for me the worst part is not the fraud, it's the complete willingness to completely ruin anyone that gets in her way that makes her so diabolical. The book Bad Blood makes it pretty clear how she pretty much threatened to destroy anyone that did the simple act of telling the truth. Her subsequent disregard for patients, Sonny as you put it, and heck her 2 kids in my opinion show how much she just does not care about other people.

tasuki 3y ago
The other stuff, sure, but how do her two kids show she doesn't care about other people?
- haneefmubarak 3y ago
  IIUC the GP's argument is that she active sought to have children after being charged primarily for the purpose of attempting to sway the courts and the public opinion lest that fail — without any consideration on the effects her actions might have on those children.

option 3y ago

regarding her victims. She has only been convicted for defrauding powerful investors like Shultz, Murdoch, Kissinger, etc. who failed to do due diligence. She has not been convicted for defrauding customers/patients or her employees. Tells much about current state of justice system… Well at least she was stopped.

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
"That most heinous of crimes, theft of money [from rich people]."
impute 3y ago
The same thing happened with the Fyre Festival. The organizers didn't face consequences from defrauding the people they sold tickets to. They face consequences from defrauding the investors.
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
That's why they put the hammer down on Bernie Madoff - he stole from the ultra wealthy. If he had been robbing the little people he would have, at most, spent a couple of years at Club Fed.
sigstoat 3y ago
how much effort should the prosecutors spend on prosecuting more challenging charges, when they had a bunch of easy ones? are they morally obligated to prosecute every single charge that might apply?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I hate this take because I hear it all the time and it's simply incorrect, at least in relation to Holmes' case. In a court of law you need to prove your case, with evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence that Holmes lied to investors for the purposes of getting money, and that she knew she was lying and did it purposefully, was undeniable - there were too many smoking guns. The evidence that she knew she was defrauding patients was always less clear cut. Besides, the prosecutors did try mightily to convict her of crimes against patients. Are you saying the 12 randomly selected jurors who found her not guilty of these crimes are in cahoots with "the current state of the justice system"?

paulpauper 3y ago

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. how would that have worked? it was a fraud before then.

jb1991 3y ago

And[0]: > Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly told a Walgreens consultant that “They don’t put pretty people like me in jail,” according to a government filing ahead of the sentencing hearing Friday. The arrogance. https://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...

postsantum 3y ago
It works most of the time but sometimes the system malfunctiones A similar story: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U
- jb1991 3y ago
  In case you or other readers here don't know, the link is satire (fake).

swalling 3y ago

The prevalence of psychopathy is significantly higher among white collar managers than the general population (4% vs. 1% according to one of the few empirical studies https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.925 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.925) Holmes, unlike most nonviolent corporate psychopaths, is only going to jail because she violated one of the only real cardinal rules of late stage capitalism, which is don’t intentionally defraud investors. She’s also one of the few psychopaths dumb enough to publicly and directly admit that she was maintaining a charade of a person who believes that other people and their emotions truly exist.

tasuki 3y ago
> publicly and directly admit that she was maintaining a charade of a person who believes that other people and their emotions truly exist Source?
- swalling 3y ago
  From https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes...: At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes is a textbook psychopath, i.e. "deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/