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Comment by headcanon | Hacker News Reader

Long story short, Elizabeth surrounded herself with politically powerful, but medically unqualified people like Kissinger and Gen. Mattis. The book Bad Blood does a very good job explaining the depths of the deception.

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I think you make it too short. Isn't it interesting that people "like Kissinger and Gen. Mattis", hard and experienced men, allowed themselves to deceived by basically a pair of crooks?

From what I've understand, upper management at Walgreens was very skeptical of Theranos but the CEO was very enamored with Elizabeth Holmes and wouldn't listen to anything negative his staff was telling him.

The other blood testing machine companies also knew that there was no way they solved all the problems Theranos claimed to solve all at once.

I suspect many of them may have known it was a scam but expected it to last long enough to IPO cashout. No proof but it is a possibility. That or they had their arrogance exploited.

There are a lot of both old and recent reasons to believe both of these examples have extremely terrible judgment.

Some situations are easier to rationalize when you are an outsider. I think many people were sceptical of Theranos. Maybe Elizabeth Holmes was charismatic enough to overcome scepsis in most people. It is baffling that she managed to become a billionaire with this tactic. I'm wondering, however, what her long-term plan was (she probably didn't have one, since everything seemed to work out well).

Besides, I found this piece on Wikipedia funny: > In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America due to a $9 billion valuation of Theranos.[5] By the next year, following revelations of potential fraud, Forbes revised her net worth to zero dollars,[6] and Fortune named Holmes one of the "World's Most Disappointing Leaders".

Oops, we were off by 9 billion dollars, how disappointing.

Sure, from the outside, with hindsight etc. But people like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis occupy power roles that demand difficult and correct decisions from the inside and without benefit of hindsight. That a pair of crooks went through this discipline and experience like a hot knife through butter tells us something about the nature of power an deception.

Fair enough, I think a lot of that had to do with how these powerful men learned what the "truth" is - since they were not qualified to understand the details of the technology from a scientists/engineers perspective, they relied on expert opinions, and many of those "experts" were also enamored with her charisma and youth, and so everyone gave her a thumbs up because everyone else had given her a thumbs up.

And to give credit where credit is due, she masterfully cultivated these relationships and used that mutual reputation network she built to create her own "truth" with her lies. Had she stuck to politics she may have been President. Hell, had she gone into software, her "fake it till you make it" strategy might have worked (not saying I'd want to work for her). Her downfall was simply that she applied this loose relationship with the truth to medical devices, which have a much higher bar for objective truth than other technologies.

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