One thing I red is that she succeeded in duping so many mostly because of connections. More savvy VC capital stayed clear of her, but she got a lot of novice investors.
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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will go on trial next summer, faces 20 years in prison
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It's not an iguana. It's a dinosaur. You have to let it shred your files and shit on the desk.
Her product also resulted in major health scares for people in the test areas. I would have been rushed to the hospital immediately if I had used one of her machines due to my bodies trouble with processing potassium.
I know, I made a follow-up post some time ago.
eyes not creepy enough. I'd say the perfect role to play her is Ivanka
Oh, in all other language versions of Wikipedia he's already there. But in english he's found under "president" instead. It's really weird.
absolutely fascinating.
Is that HBO documentary from this past March? If so I'm going to watch it tonight.]
edit: yes, it is. but 2 hours is too rich for my blood at 1:48am.
Is that HBO documentary from this past March? If so I'm going to watch it tonight.]
edit: yes, it is. but 2 hours is too rich for my blood at 1:48am.
as one would expect of a 2-hour docu for something thing like this. can only squeeze in so much.
will look up the book
For fucks sake, they sold the product at Walgreens so that people could self-diagnose like this is MyHeritage. She made most of her revenue from this, claimed the results were valid, and then had to close that down in 2016 after misdiagnosing lots of people and being sued for it.
Only then is when they turned to really trying to get into the proper medical testing industry, but first they made their pitch as a ridiculously affordable way of getting blood tests, as opposed to the traditional method, and you just have to read articles from the rags of the time to see it:
"Like many other medical procedures in the U.S., the cost of blood work can vary hugely from laboratory to laboratory, and having health insurance doesn't seem to make a difference. A 2013 ABC News investigation found that a woman was charged more than $4,000 for blood work at an in-network facility, while the cost for the same battery of tests at an independent lab cost just $260."
And Theranos was supposed to put an end to this.
So forgive me, but this is what allowed Theranos to fool investors and consumers for so long. They had this avenue of revenue, and they tried to exploit it for as long as they could because they thought they would face no scrutiny, until they were sued and had to stop, and only then they turned to trying to pitch it as a substitute for real blood tests, promising the 2.0 version of their technology would actually work.
Lmao. The only time White defendants are guaranteed to get treated like everyone else is when they ripoff rich White people.
Bernie Madoff would be a free man if he had only targeted Black families for subprime mortgage lending.
I really don't understand. So it was all a hoax for all those years? At its height Theranos had 800 employees. What were they all doing? When it's not possible to conduct bloodtest with that tiny amount of blood? They kept doing it, but with inaccurate results? Does Holmes have mental problems or something? What did she think the endgame was supposed to look like?
I finished the book in May, cruising through the podcast now.
As a biotech worker the story is fascinating and horrifying. But the angle that gets overlooked quite often in the "how did this happen" roundup is privilege. Grifters come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, but this person cost the 20 year CEO of Safeway his job, had an active US general (Mattis) vouching for her technology to be used on the battlefield, a young employee/whistleblower (Tyler Shultz) got disowned by his own grandfather, and famous investor Tim Draper is still stanning for the company (& Holmes).
Not one of these people ever saw a validated prototype of the technology she claimed she had. She never published in a reputable scientific journal. She never got FDA approval for her medical device. Theranos' board was stocked with people who knew fuck all about blood science or medical devices.
Her family and Stanford connections gave her an impossible advantage in the startup world, an advantage that snowballed into an impossible to ignore list of big name supporters, an advantage so great that her only chance of failure was being a complete sociopathic piece of shit who broke every possible rule about running a medical device company. And even then, it took a decade+ and several years of patients getting bogus results for someone to go on the record that the emperor had no clothes.
People proudly shared stories of how they became enamored with Elizabeth because of her family's history and previous success. That she was a dropout with no medical training was irrelevant - she had the right pedigree that suggested she could do what she said, no questions asked.
As a biotech worker the story is fascinating and horrifying. But the angle that gets overlooked quite often in the "how did this happen" roundup is privilege. Grifters come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, but this person cost the 20 year CEO of Safeway his job, had an active US general (Mattis) vouching for her technology to be used on the battlefield, a young employee/whistleblower (Tyler Shultz) got disowned by his own grandfather, and famous investor Tim Draper is still stanning for the company (& Holmes).
Not one of these people ever saw a validated prototype of the technology she claimed she had. She never published in a reputable scientific journal. She never got FDA approval for her medical device. Theranos' board was stocked with people who knew fuck all about blood science or medical devices.
Her family and Stanford connections gave her an impossible advantage in the startup world, an advantage that snowballed into an impossible to ignore list of big name supporters, an advantage so great that her only chance of failure was being a complete sociopathic piece of shit who broke every possible rule about running a medical device company. And even then, it took a decade+ and several years of patients getting bogus results for someone to go on the record that the emperor had no clothes.
People proudly shared stories of how they became enamored with Elizabeth because of her family's history and previous success. That she was a dropout with no medical training was irrelevant - she had the right pedigree that suggested she could do what she said, no questions asked.
Her dad was a VP at Enron, so grifting is likely literally in the blood.
- The hoax to her shareholders was that the machine that she promised (a microfluidics wonderbox that could run every modern bloodtest) was scrapped early on, and any investor demo that showed the machine running flawlessly was faked. The hoax to patients was that the various cobbled together solutions they came up with gave results that were clearly less accurate than existing tests. This includes the tests they ran on competitor devices, since their standard method involved diluting blood samples to get them to work on said devices.
- Theranos had unusually high turnover for a biotech company. Anyone who said the technology goal was impossible or raised issue with how the company handled data/testing was either demoted, bullied, threatened with lawsuits, quit, or was outright fired. Everyone who left had to sign an NDA about their time working there. The various engineering teams were given the task of improving the technology, the software team was tasked with getting the UI stable and functional, the design teams were tasked with making it as "Apple" as possible on the outside, the various lab teams were given the task of running the tests on either the Theranos machines or the commercial machines, none of the teams were allowed to talk to one another or share data unsupervised.
- the microfluidics platform hit a wall early on, because the the nature of blood and coagulation presents all sorts of problems to a microfluidics design. They ended up settling on a makeshift micro-pipette ELISA assay (the Edison) that required diluting the blood substantially to get any data at all, a spectrophotometer (the minilab/4s) that was still in prototype stages when it was being pushed into clinics, and reverse engineered commercial machines. They claimed that results from all 3 (inaccurate) platforms were coming from the same device.
- Theranos encouraged employees to ignore failed QC tests and to throw out data outliers without any statistical rationale. They faked out state and federal investigators for some time by hiding parts of their facilities and most of their employees from testimonials.
- at the very least, she is a pathological liar obsessed with her image as Steve Jobs' successor. She lied about everything, big and small, to every person in her life. Based on the various public profiles I'd say she's an outright sociopath.
- her intent was actually to have a company that did what she promised. But she also intended to have billions of dollars, exclusive partnerships, a flashy crafted public image, and a good chunk of marketshare years before the technology caught up to her goals because she felt she deserved those things just for having a good idea. So the entire company was a MLM-type scam that regularly lied to investors and endangered patients in the brief time they had store presence. When she finally publicly revealed the Edison and miniLab (after the scandal broke), the scientific community's collective response was "this is nothing new, shame on you".
Damn. That's crazy. This must be one of the biggest scam ever. Theranos at its peak was worth $10 billion. Absolutely insane.
I know I shill it regularly, but Behind the Bastards has a good series on Elizabeth Holmes.
She's a grifter, pure and simple. IMO she'll get a slap on the wrist because she's, well, white and wealthy.
She's a grifter, pure and simple. IMO she'll get a slap on the wrist because she's, well, white and wealthy.
The evidence against her is iron-clad and I doubt she has much money anymore after all legal fees (which has plenty more to pay of) and presumably not having a job this entire time.
It's hilarious how many high-profile Republicans sat on her board. Schultz, Kissinger, and probably most egregiously Mattis, who went to bat for her tech as being useful to soldiers in the field in Afghanistan even though the tech was never deployed to troops in Afghanistan at all!
Because you only need to convince the right person in each of those institutions. The book goes into detail about how plenty of people at those places saw through it but their bosses wouldn't listen.
Wasn't that quote made up? There was one major testimonial on their website that was, they mention it in the documentary.
They weren't selling to end consumers at Walgreens. They sold it to Walgreens clinics.
Certainly, the high cost of US healthcare played a part in this, but if the machine worked as advertised it would be desirable anywhere in the world, not just in the USA.
Sorry for the necro-bump but I didn't think this was worth a new thread on its own.
Looks like Holmes' lawyers want out. She hasn't paid them in a year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...beth-holmes-this-time-with-her-own-attorneys/
Looks like Holmes' lawyers want out. She hasn't paid them in a year.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...beth-holmes-this-time-with-her-own-attorneys/
That's hilarious but unsurprising.
Hope she goes to prison for a long ass time.
Not paying your bills isn't a grift. She's just broke.
Then again, she didn't pay them for a whole year and they are just now quitting? Maybe she did grift them.
Potentially the least surprising development in her saga. When you grift everyone else, why would the people involved in trying to help save you from a conviction be the only ones exempt?
Hey I got it. Romi and Michelle high school reunion 2 .
She looks like that actress and they had the same backstory lol.
Isn't she now with some hotel heir who's worth tons of money? They can't pay a lawyer?
There's a clip where she slips up for a second from like CNN or something out there. It was in one of the previous threads.
It would be pretty funny if she had to rely on a public defender. That's a bad situation in even a simple case but something like this? As the kids say "yikes."