Theranos Inc.’s Partners in Blood
wsj.com
wsj.com
- focus is on Balwani, the COO who drove to work in cars with vanity plates on his sports cars that read DAZKPTL and VDIVICI
- Balwani and Holmes met in Beijing as part of a Stanford course in China, she was young and bullied by the other students and Balwani took her under his wing
- apparently Holmes and Balwani were dating, she fired him, they aren't together and because of the ongoing criminal probe have been instructed not to speak with each other
- Balwani had a small war against Glassdoor reviews including having HR post fake ones and pressuring Glassdoor into taking down overly negative ones
- Holmes' weirdly low voice was an act! She's been caught using her normal register.
- They invited VP Biden to tour a fake lab.
Man the onion layers of weirdness just never stop peeling away about this company.
This now seems par for the course. Many many companies are posting fake Glassdoor reviews (and trying to get bad ones taken down) now.
Was going to say that's kind of a silly thing say, but after watching a few videos it is kind of unsettling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YecjzEScXqU&t=105
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfaJZAdfNE&t=403
Had the other signals not been there I'd say, whatever, they want to appear more powerful by using "top 10 tips and tricks of persuasion". However given the other controversy and shadiness it just adds to the pile.
I dunno, there's no actual evidence of that though? He just mentioned an anecdote from one employee.
It seems a bit far fetched... How would the overhead of such an act be worth it? And in 10+ years she never slipped up on video? And what about everyone that knows her in real life?
I actually know someone who does this (disclaimer: an ex-boyfriend of my wife). He's a scrawny little guy, arms like noodles but he puts on this big... booming... voice. He's done it for so long that I guess it's become a habit but far from having the desired effect people just snigger about it behind his back. I guess there was a book or a "guru" at some point that advised this in order to seem more leader-y.
Ah yes, the dot-com bubble at its finest.
It was obvious to many commenters on HN that these people were crooks long before the media caught up. But comments critical of them were often flagged or deleted. Musk’s house of cards receives the same preferential treatment.
How many lives does a wacky billionaire get to destroy before HN stops running interference?
How much blood does a god need to bleed before we stop worshipping them?
Call to mind the Michael Dell letter about Apple.
Think in terms of your confidence about the current environment, right now. Would you bet something invaluable -- your children's lives, let's say -- that e.g. Uber will not be worth $10b on public markets in 5 years?
If not, we have to ack there's uncertainty in the moment. It's only after the fact that the probability density function collapses to 1, and we forget about the other options.
Maybe it is from growing up in an environment where I've seen people who love power and control (even if that's only over a very small amount of people), it desn't shock me that ramps up with increasing power and fame.
There are a lot of people on the scene today which are obvious hucksters, but nobody is going to admit that (and some won't) until their lies actually ruin things. Again, see Draper whom even knowing what he does is willing to lie or be delusional about what happened there.
Consider that there's lots and lots of people who are willing to actually give up their lives for weird cult leaders. If that's the case (and those lies are very obvious to all but a small few), there's so much room on the other side of that where you can be equally as manipulative and fraudulent but because it's only business or politics and not religion, people aren't willing to apply the same standard and say, yeah, that guy is a liar who likes people talking about him (or whatever gender).
Usually people in positions of power have actively sought that power, and it attracts a very specific kind of personality.
http://www.businessinsider.com/musk-epic-failure-2016-5?op=1
Tesla reported first-quarter earnings last week, and while they were better than Wall Street expected, the earthshaking news that emerged was that Musk is taking the carmaker in a new strategic direction.
Tesla, which delivered about 50,000 vehicles last year, is aiming to deliver 500,000 in 2018. The production target isn't new, but the timeline is. Tesla had previously said it would build half a million cars a year by 2020.
This did not happen, which led him to Tweet last July that they could deliver 20k cars per month by Dec. This did not happen either. Investors were relieved they managed to hit 2k per week as of March (this is down from the 2.5k they were targeting).
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832
It's really not a difficult tactic. If you have lots of money you can subsidize lots of failure. The failure ends up ignored, but your 10% hit ratio is looked at as though you're some kind of visionary. You can do that for a long time, if you've got the runway. Holmes will probably be running a very big company in about a decade.
I'm a big Musk fan but Autopilot definitely pisses me off. It's a hugely exaggerated term for laypeople which is why people keep dying on it and I'm highly skeptical they can get full autonomy with their current sensors (and apparently some of his autonomous workers agree which is why they left). You win that round because I agree that is a bullshit promise which will likely be unsolved in its current iteration due to his cop out of "bar regulatory approval".
Your other points are all about timelines which I and most others know he always always always underestimates (I don't even know of one that he actually has hit). However, I still feel as though he hits most of those targets eventually and he is definitely moving way faster than other companies towards the hard problems he is trying to solve which is why I don't care nor believe any of his timeline estimates.
Don't really notice this. Got any examples (I follow tesla and spacex a lot so I'm probably biased towards backing him)?
>How he's constantly pivoting to projects which are years away?
Really> His Tesla master plan has been on point. The only spacex big change I can remember is the huge delays to falcon heavy but that was primarily due to falcon 9 capabilities growing by leaps and bounds cannibalizing almost all of the heavy contracts (also, changing falcon 9 capabilities effects falcon heavy design).
And then you compare the user list to /r/ula and /r/nasa and various Tesla shorts groups, and you'll find a similar list of usernames. Hmm.
If you promise to deliver something at a particular time and deliver it later, you did not meet your promise.
Just one example that criticism of Theranos wasn't suppressed as far back as 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397149
More exists.
Also, equating Musk to Theranos is a bit ridiculous.
Seems plausible to me.
I've also heard that Tim Draper is an old family friend of Holmes; perhaps that is clouding his judgement.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/business/theranos-founder...
Disclaimer - He passed years ago, but he's an investor in our latest venture.
I'm not interested in debating the moral aspects, as I suspect we violently agree. But it's crucial to be specific, against current legal code, when stating things like you did.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/
It changes your referer to "Facebook" every time you connect to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/theranos-inc-s-partners-in-...
Edit: Because it freaked someone out, clicking on this link redirects you via. Facebook. You don't need to be logged into Facebook for it to work.
If this worked for anyone, please just copy/paste the article text in here... assuming that's allowed.
What you said would make sense if we knew that she had him as role model. THEN you could make the case that role models are important and claim that I downplay their importance. But we don't know if she had him as role model, so again you're guessing. I could just as easily make opposite guess: do you know how easy it is to manipulate men by dangling sex in front of them?