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I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up. Some professor was going on and on about Holmes

• glimshe 27d ago
  It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
  • FranzFerdiNaN 27d ago
    Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
    • mvdwoord 27d ago
      No one markets ‘male founder’ as a reason to trust the business. Once gender is framed as a virtue, people start asking whether that claim actually means anything.
      • Applejinx 27d ago
        The government does! At least right now in the United States. And yeah, I think it's reasonable for people to start asking.
        • xyzelement 26d ago
          Is there an example of this that you could reference?
    • xyzelement 27d ago
      The point is that anything subject to hype is also at a greater risk of being a scam. If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline. That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
      • manphone 27d ago
        That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
        • Mainan_Tagonist 27d ago
          then again, how good a manager would she have made if she was bossing around colleagues to the point of them quitting? Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect. I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
          • benzible 26d ago
            Or perhaps this guy perceived normal, appropriate management that he would have been perfectly fine with had it come from a man as “bossy” when it came from a woman.
            • Mainan_Tagonist 26d ago
              or perhaps she was just a toxic colleague, with tons of experience in a narrow field that he did not have and making colleagues leave was just her thing. Vote me down all you want, women are just as capable as men in every way, including the wrong, toxic ones
    • micromacrofoot 27d ago
      [flagged]
      • tmtvl 27d ago
        Thing is, SBF, Tate, and Paul aren't old (well, depends on your frame of reference I suppose); so even discriminating on age wouldn't help you much.
        • micromacrofoot 26d ago
          indeed one could find exceptions to every rule
      • theopsimist 27d ago
        You a vc?
        • 3748488448 27d ago
          heh
      • azan_ 26d ago
        Then you are sexist and racist, nothing to be proud of!
        • micromacrofoot 26d ago
          funny that no one said that to the parent comment that blindly speculated that holmes caused more sexism simply for being a woman yet bring up the ruling class and that gets called out for sexism despite the endless string of fraud cases covered by those demographics
          • azan_ 26d ago
            I’m sure that if parent comment said that he doesn’t trust black women he’d get called out.
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 27d ago
      Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
      • philipallstar 27d ago
        > If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win. And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
        • Aaargh20318 27d ago
          Because Madoff scammed rich people. You can get away with a lot if you scam the poor. Not so much when you target the wealthy.
          • philipallstar 27d ago
            That makes no sense within the topic of conversation.
            • shermantanktop 27d ago
              Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are. The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent. But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
              • philipallstar 26d ago
                I don't think it's that simple. If Bernie Sanders were an unknown, but had stabbed Iryna Zarutska on video and walked off saying he got that white girl, I'm pretty sure he would've still gone to jail and been subject to the death penalty. It's more than high-status people generally don't do that sort of thing, because you probably didn't get where you were if you were that unintelligent, violent, and impulsive. In fact, in that exact case the chap who did it was treated far too leniently by the justice system and they've un-"Progressived" the law in some ways to make it so he would never be able to do that again. Which is progress. Or at least the undoing of Progress.
    • philipallstar 27d ago
      > Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted. Only if you're determined to look for it. No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave. Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
      • Grombobulous 27d ago
        I regret engaging, comment removed.
        • philipallstar 27d ago
          EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling. > Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen. Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence. > Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told. That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about. > Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result. No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Bryson_case
    • JuniperMesos 27d ago
      No one thinks that the number of males participating in business is too low, and that it is socially-beneficial and morally-important to promote male-run businesses.
    • OroPla 27d ago
      It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes. But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
      • catchnear4321 27d ago
        The patterns did not form themselves. It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”
        • amiga386 27d ago
          Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it. Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests. Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership. Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly. They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money. Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
          • catchnear4321 27d ago
            Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)
          • lelanthran 26d ago
    • deleted 27d ago
      [deleted]
    • Hilliard_Ohiooo 27d ago
      [dead]
    • Gravityloss 26d ago
      https://xkcd.com/385/ https://xkcd.com/385/ This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.
    • lelanthran 26d ago
      > Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic. Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur"). Unfortunately, the gender sale was a big part of the scam. I'm looking at many male-led scams, and they did not sell it based on the gender of the scammer. > Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted. No, it only proves that you have ideology deeply rooted. I believe you see sexism everywhere. The type of person you just want to say "oookay, huh, is sexism here, in the room with us?"
      • kelseyfrog 26d ago
        I'd hesitate to jump to the conclusion that Holmes had editorial control over the way journalists portrayed her. The idea that a 'young woman overcoming the odds' story sells more than 'young man overcoming the odds' doesn't take any leaps of faith to explain. That doesn't mean that Holmes didn't benefit from such coverage, she obviously did, but to call it part of the scam as if it was under her control seems a bit far fetched.
        • FireBeyond 26d ago
          If you read a lot of the in depth reporting, and what came up at trial, Holmes and Bagwani themselves and their PR team pushed it heavily. The media lapped it up but she was fully "leaned in".
          • expedition32 26d ago
            It wouldn't have worked if we lived in a world were start ups being led by women was normal and investors didn't think with their dicks. But alas.
            • lelanthran 26d ago
              It wouldn't have worked if people weren't biased in favour of women.
  • Mattrou 26d ago
    https://xkcd.com/385/ https://xkcd.com/385/
  • epistasis 26d ago
    Interestingly you won't find this for well connected white males. Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.
    • xyzelement 26d ago
      If you think about it a little harder, the pattern isn't just gender but "thing you are standing out for". In the Holmes case, she was visibly celebrated for being a young female (as a positive) so it's not shocking that it flipped to a negative on people's mind when she was proven to be a fraud. In the case of SBF, he wasn't celebrated for being male. But he was notable for his association with "effective altruism". Has the reputation of the EA community been adversely affected by his downfall? Absolutely. So that's the more part analogy here.
      • phatfish 25d ago
        Fair enough. But SBF chose to associate with "effective altruism". Did Holmes create the "I'm an amazing FEMALE entrepreneur" persona? Or was she focused on the scam and the narrative was created around her?
    • alyeska2 26d ago
      You also won't find this for future female founders, because the comment you're replying to is a random internet poster imagining things. You can say "I can imagine VCs saying..." and then complete the sentence with literally anything nonsense, it doesn't mean its real. A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder. No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.
    • anukin 26d ago
• analog8374 27d ago
  It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped. Word to wise entrepreneurs.
• jgalt212 27d ago
  Somewhat relevant from The Economist. > Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-was-about-identity-woke-2-is-about-class https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...
• olalonde 27d ago
  Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0]. [0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-of-cambridge-university-professor-jason-arday/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...
• tdb7893 26d ago
  The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
  • embedding-shape 26d ago
    Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
    • watwut 26d ago
      They still say it about Sam Bankman Friendman and that failed situation awareness fund dude that worked for him. They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
      • aanet 26d ago
        Let’s not forget the new new wunderkind who was hailed as the new financial genius and whose AI fund got trash sold to Citadel for 20% of its value (after rising 450% of course)
    • noir_lord 26d ago
      Musk as well among others.
      • xyzelement 26d ago
        I find this a week comparison. I've driven a Tesla, I've used PayPal. My government has used spaceX to do space things. Whatever you think of Musk there's a significant amount of "actually exists and works" that's on a different planet vs Theranos
• tootie 26d ago
  I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.
  • xyzelement 26d ago
    I think it's a little different. To use a micro-example - I've been to various Trump buildings around the world. I've skated at a trump operated rink, I've seen the trump golf courses. So whatever opinion we have about trump and his practices, there's clearly a tangible output, a product that people use and enjoy. I do agree that trump certainly cultivates an image of success but there is also clearly tangible success there. SBF and Holmes are in a different category in that there was nothing behind it.
    • tootie 26d ago
      It's pretty well documented that his father groomed his image for him with the money he earned in real estate. A lot of things with Trump's name on them are things he didn't actually build. They are branding agreements.
• martythemaniak 26d ago
  Have you ever wondered the same about other scams? Who else do you think was shaped "correctly"? Also, isn't affinity fraud most types of fraud?
  • xyzelement 26d ago
    Umm yes? Example: when crypto was at the height of hype, I assumed that most businesses in that space were scams(to different degrees) - and that those who invested in the scam ones without due diligence were taken in by wanting to ride that wave.
• kthartic 26d ago
  At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder
  • xyzelement 26d ago
    You are missing the point. The praise of her was devoid of even a nod to the actual element of achievement. I know this because this was the first time I heard of Holmes and obviously well before the downfall and the fact that the story jumps out from my memory is because of how weird that phrasing was.
• epistasis 26d ago
  Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
  • hn_throwaway_99 26d ago
    Hard disagree. It wasn't the only thing, but it was so clear that all the fawning, uncritical media coverage and general buzz really "wanted a female Steve Jobs". And all the ways that Holmes emulated Jobs in style but not substance went along with that. I'll give you another example that was about the same time, with much lower stakes, but it always really annoyed me. An entrepreneur, Grace Choi, launched the "Mink 3D makeup printer" at Tech crunch Disrupt in 2014. At the time, it was pretty clear to me that the device was an idea that wasn't functional yet, but there was tons of coverage at the time of how revolutionary this was, and also basically scoffing at the idea that the male-only TechCrunch judging panel couldn't possibly have any ability to evaluate the device, and any criticisms they had were obviously just sexism. Here is an example of a typical fawning article at the time: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniserestauri/2014/06/30/a-harvard-woman-is-blowing-up-the-55-billion-beauty-industry-with-3d-printed-makeup/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniserestauri/2014/06/30/a-har... Now, Ms. Choi is not an Elizabeth Holmes, and from what I can tell it looks like she eventually got something functional (but honestly I can't tell how much) around 2019-2020. But she never "blew up" anything, I'm unable to tell if she ever had real deliveries, and her minkbeauty.com website looks to be defunct. I'm not blaming her for creating a product that failed, but moreso what she did create was a ton of uncritical coverage from the perspective of "She's a woman disrupting a world men don't understand!" The world is now teeming with hucksters and fakers, and sure, while I'd guess the majority of those hucksters and fakers are likely men, whenever you create unspoken rules that "people of a certain sex/race/class aren't allowed to criticize because they don't have the 'lived experience'" then you obviously throw the door wide open to shysters who will take advantage of that.
    • epistasis 26d ago
      > uncritical media coverage and general buzz really "wanted a female Steve Jobs". And all the ways that Holmes emulated Jobs in style but not substance went along with that. Even if you're right, so what? Nobody signed over millions in investment on that basis. Nobody signed contracts on that basis. They signed contracts on the basis of the influence network and the prior investment money, i.e. the connections that Holmes had. There are not a ton of women founders, but none of them have had the media coverage, nor the easy money that Holmes raised. TL;DR Was Holmes unique for being a woman? Or was she actually unique because she had massive connections with tons of influence, and that influence got her media coverage rather than being a woman?
• zeckalpha 26d ago
  Or the other way: The reason the scam was caught was because people were looking for flaws. Society gives a lot of grace to male scammers.
  • olalonde 26d ago
    The scam was caught due to a whistleblower, not because people were looking for flaws.
    • zeckalpha 24d ago
      Whistleblowers get ignored regularly.
• 6stringmerc 26d ago
  [dead]
• rzwitserloot 26d ago
  It's a wider take on [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law): - young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would. - ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful. - ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power. - even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!' I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
• torgoguys 26d ago
  Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
  • tashi 26d ago
    Well, to become the world's youngest female billionaire, you just have to pick the right parents and birth date. Difficult to do for sure, but seems much less interesting to talk about than becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
• Arodex 26d ago
  Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.
  • atmavatar 26d ago
    Yet paradoxically, being old is nearly a requirement for political office. Biden was the oldest president in history, and with his re-election, Trump will become the oldest president in history should he live out his term. The average age of the 119th Congress overall is 59 years old, with the House averaging 57 and the Senate averaging 64. For comparison, the average age of the US as a whole is just under 39. This is probably one of the largest reasons the country is in the state it's in: most of those in power won't live long enough to see the consequences of the policies they enact, so they don't give a damn.
    • mananaysiempre 26d ago
      It’s partly by design—the word senate shares its root with the word senex “old man” (whence also senile, etc.) because it’s literally a council of elders. That’s what the Roman one was and what the US constitution (among others) was attempting to emulate. Partly, though, it’s a bit more interesting than that[1]. Wikipedia has an interesting chart[2] titled “Lifespan of each United States president”, which shows that in modern-ish times, the generation from which US presidents come is sticky: you get three presidents born ca. 1855, then one born ca. 1865, two ca. 1875, three from the late 1880s, four(!) from the 1910s (starting with “young” JFK), Carter/Reagan/Bush Sr. oscillate between the 1910s and 1920s, then again four from the 1940s (starting with “young” Clinton) only interrupted by “young” Obama (born 1961). (I could start my recounting earlier and it would still work.) Trump and Biden appear abnormal if you look at their ages, but if you look at their birth years instead they are simply a backslide, after Obama, to the generation of Clinton and Bush Jr. What does appear true is that generations hold onto their power for longer and longer before the snap transition to the next eligible generation happens. Longer life expectancy due to better medical care seems like a perfectly satisfactory explanation for that. [1] I first read about this idea a few years ago and I don’t remember where, so I’ll need to attempt my own explanation. Sorry. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age#Graphical_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
• satvikpendem 26d ago
  I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-graham-farmelo-review-the-dark-side-of-genius https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...
  • tzury 26d ago
    I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking. What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
    • NDizzle 26d ago
      Words will never be a human, for what it's worth. May as well delete that code path, as it'll never be reached.
    • satvikpendem 26d ago
      By that logic don't read anything at all.
      • mmooss 26d ago
        ? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.
        • satvikpendem 25d ago
          They specifically said > What I read !== Stephen Hawking. And by that logic one cannot know anything or anyone by merely reading about them, which I find to be absurd, hence my comment.
• SubmarineClub 26d ago
  Yes, 100% Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.
• Spooky23 26d ago
  She cosplayed Steve Jobs with the sweater, had obviously studied the west coast CEO bullshit trope stuff, and everything and used her earnest attractive nature to dupe a bunch of well known old men to endorse her. Being female was a part of the grift but not the most notable. Many male grifters do the same thing without the girl power thing. Being female is key for the sympathy play after the fact, and this little exercise to fish for a pardon from POTUS with a documentary. She went from Steve Jobs Girlboss to exploited victim, boo hoo.
  • FireBeyond 26d ago
    Yeah, the Balwani stuff. Now I know there is nuance and some people will read this as victim shaming but... "she was really just a innocent naive girl fighting her way up and through, revolutionizing tech and the medical industry, but being beat down, serially sexually harassed, if not assaulted, or abused by Balwani, the real evil in this story"... Except she was the CEO. She might have had a romantic relationship with Balwani but she was his boss. "Powerless to help herself and stop this from happening". To steal from our current occupant in the White House, "You're fired". None of that was an issue until her trial.
• dekhn 26d ago
  My memory is from when I was an advisor for Google Ventures. Theranos had come by looking for funding but wouldn't talk with GV except with an NDA (and VC will usually not sign NDAs). That made GV suspicious so they sent an employee to get tested by the device and noticed the test results came from a competitor's machine. They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
  • deleted 26d ago
    [deleted]
• cyanydeez 26d ago
  Yeah, the same for POTUS. scams are best lead by people who both wNt to believe and hangerons that want to profit on the grift. In isolation, its typically just a cult. Throw in capitalism and suddenly, theres real stakes around the belief.
• sho_hn 26d ago
  This is also a big reason for e.g. the Wirecard fiasco in Germany: Everyone, especially the politicians, really wanted a fin tech blue chip out of dot-de and wanted desperately to believe. That said, Holmes being a woman is also why we're discussing this documentary and why everyone is almost gleefully interested in her downfall. If a man had done this one it'd have all blown over long ago.