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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Is Holmes still rich after this? I can't tell just how much of her wealth she's being forced to return in form of shares.

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She's half a million poorer from the fine. Any proceed from the sale of the (worthless) shares will need to be returned to defrauded investors amounting to 750 mil before she gets anything.

So i think unless her entire position is sold for more then $36 a share she has lost everything from the company.

No idea what her personal finances were going in to this event.

Do we know if she was rich before? Maybe she was able to cash out a lot of her shares during some of the financing rounds, but she also could have just been "rich" on paper by owning many Theranos shares. If she was rich by virtue of holding Theranos shares, her wealth has decreased a ton in the last couple years since the value of the company has surely plummeted.

The SEC document says that she never sold any of her shares, and says

> Holmes was paid a salary of approximately $200,000 to $390,000 per year between 2013 and 2015

Hey, I've no idea how to PM you, but you flagged my submission about the SEC charging another company... Equifax. This story is about Theranos.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16586011

> "on the front page, please check for duplicates before submitting"

oops, embarassing... there's been discussion about equifax too, but I guess that was the criminal part and not SEC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980

I'm sure she must have sold some part of her shares when Theranos got funding in the early days.

>Is Holmes still rich after this?

But why it matters at all? Penalty should be proportional to the deed, not to the person's finances.

As a curious aside: In some scandanavian countries, the penalties are directly tied to wealth (e.g. the $103,000 speeding ticket [1]). The idea is to make the punishment proportional to each individual so that wealth cannot simply grant you a free pass to violate "minor" laws.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

I like that, instead of "the punishment should fit the crime" it should be "the punishment should disincentivize the person from doing it again"

I think there is a reasonable argument that it should be proportional to finance. Let's say two people both get speeding tickets, one of whom is making $10 an hour the other makes $100 an hour. There is an argument that you should fine them based on their income as a proportional punishment, otherwise the fine may be excessive for the person with a small income, but negligible and not a deterrant for a person with a large income.

It matters because fixed fees mean a % of the population will be unscathed by those consequences, and a % will be unable to afford the fine.

no, individualized sentences are part of the justice procedure.

> But why it matters at all? Penalty should be proportional to the deed, not to the person's finances.

I would argue the opposite, why do you think this is the case?

Isn't it basic profiling, in this case based on wealth? Should rich people be penalized more for their mistakes than poor people?

And what we're arguing is not that right now they are being penalized less and should be penalized the same.

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