Theranos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say
theregister.com
theregister.com
Does that expose her new husband to financial liability from the fraud lawsuit?
And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). (see edit below)
What would be unusual is for the charges to be reduced or even dropped. But, as it stands, she’s facing 20 years in prison. Possibly more after this incident.
EDIT: I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t be allowed to get married post-conviction. I was saying that, even if the right to marriage was removed when convicted, she’s still not convicted.
That's wrong; getting married while awaiting trial is allowed in the same way that getting married before being charged is allowed, and getting married after being convicted is allowed.
The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
> The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.
So if she gets fined or successfully sued, the husband could find himself with a wife he can't see for 20 years and a big line of creditors taking all his assets and future earnings.
But that's quite different than being a psychopath like a serial killer is.
Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.
Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.
I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.
Still, as you say, next-level dedication.
He appears to be of the 1% group.
She spoke at an artificially low pitch. This isn't exactly unheard of; almost all Japanese women speak at an artificially high pitch.
In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.
(Something about the people that the career enables and only sometimes makes visible)
The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.
I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.
This is surprising on so many levels. He'll likely spend the rest of his life in prison. He was a ruthless killer. And his treatment of women is well documented and... not flattering.
Tbh, even knowing that it's a 100% calculated move, I would personally as a juror have a much harder time sentencing a woman with a young child to significant prison time.
I think this is one of the things I learned from Ken White on All the President's Lawyers: we read about legal system abuse here and there and it shocks us, but even the most common normal things in the criminal justice system like how long criminal trials take can be just as shocking if only you know about them.
Yeah, and some like Assange spend their time in prison BEFORE their trial.
You can demand it goes faster. In the US this is specifically the "speedy trial" provision of the Sixth Amendment. The government is obliged to provide "speedy trial" if demanded - if it can't do that it isn't entitled to a trial at all.
However, your lawyers (and she can afford good ones) will almost invariably advise you not to do that unless things have gotten entirely out of hand - because speedy trial applies to both sides, and the prosecution will have the rough outline of their case before they even file charges, so unless you're in a hurry t go to prison...
You can get married before or after being convicted, in prison or otherwise. Criminal convictions don't affect your ability to get married.
Slight hijack, but this is a key reason behind the movement to abolish cash bail. The thrust of the argument is essentially that people with more financial resources can pay bail. Those without those resources cannot, so the pre-trial period is often a de facto prison sentence whose length is unknown in advance. This setup obviously results in a tiered justice system.
There are ~500k people in jail who are innocent under the law. The elimination of cash bail is intended to eliminate this disparity.
<rant>
You end up with things like California’s SB-10 (thankfully overturned by Prop 25[0]) that would’ve replaced it by a risk assessment “AI” black box.[a]
[a]: SB-10 would supposedly have required “tools [that] shall be demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable”. But what science? Crime statistics says black people commit more crimes, but some claims that those numbers are the result of overpolicing. Who’s right?
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_C...
I understand that DC rarely uses cash bail and has a 40+ year track record showing that 90% of accused show for their trial dates and > 90% are not re-arrested before trial. So maybe since that system seems to work for the most part, we could use that as a basis? Or at least require a very strong burden of proof before we presume people guilty because they are not wealthy?
How much better is the cash bail system at producing defendants at trial than DC's system? Is it so much better that it's worth ignoring our Constitution?
If nothing else, we spend ~$17B incarcerating innocent (again, per our law) people. Seems like an incredible waste of money and human potential. Maybe we try something else.
They moved pretty quick on Martin Shkreli.
He just happened to have a lot of damning evidence against him and a pretty shit defence team, coupled with a shit PR problem in all media outlets, which made his case a toss-in.
Especially when you're dealing with the defendants purposely scuttling evidence of a highly technical nature. The court will not treat this lightly.
which leads us to her getting married. part to maintain her lifestyle she was used to during Theranos's time at the top and part to make her more appealing to any jury and doubly so if she can get on stand pregnant. her court appearances that have pictures usually show her without makeup and fancy clothing. So the question then is, sociopath or Psychopath? Probably the former from the assumption of the victimhood
She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works.
This revolving door with industry and policy makers gets a very uncritical eye by the media (especially compared to other frivolous background details) and obviously by the self morality of the participant speakers themselves.
I personally hope Chandrasekaran gets in trouble for hiding evidence. But nepotism and conflicts of interest seem to be super common in the upper tiers of industry and politics, which Theranos famously surrounded themselves with, right down to their board of directors being politicians and ex generals.
Eh. People make these kinds of statements, but though that may be true in some cases, it isn't true in many other cases. For example, there are plenty of organizations that are flush with cash that want a political celebrity (whether it be Yellen, Hillary Clinton or Obama) to come and speak to their membership or conference without expecting anything in return other than the speech they give. Why? Because people like to be around celebrities, political or otherwise.
I attend healthcare conferences where attendees number in tens of thousands (paying hundreds per attendee to attend) and hundreds of vendors paying hundreds of thousands or millions to display and advertise their products... For that conference to shell out $500k to have Hillary Clinton do an opening speech is peanuts.
Can a city in a poor country afford anyone here's fee to visit them to speak on their area of expertise?
The fact that nonsense like this is actually upvoted on HN is absolutely hilarious to me.
The idea that all it takes is $300k to change monetary policy in the US is absolutely nutty.
The position that she only gave one speech and it was in direct exchange for a huge change in monetary policy is a strawman.
159,000/mo is 4 FTEs at typical consulting rates.
You need a DBA to manage the database, an developer to spin up some reports, someone to manage the project, and an ETL developer to get the data in and out?
There’s your $159,000/mo “database”.
Are there cheaper ways to do it? Of course. But that isn’t why anyone hires consultants.
Some companies hire consultants precisely because their internal politics are so bad that they're unable to get the work done themselves.
I don't know anything about these companies at hand here, but I wouldn't scoff at these numbers alone.
I say this having been a consultant.
The people actually hiring these consultants usually don't care much about the skills of the individual developers. They're concerned mainly about resolving the issues that led them to hire those consultants in the first place. These often include things like:
1. Timeline. Can this consultant start work immediately? Do they have expertise in my tech stack, my industry, my regulatory environment, my particular business problem?
2. Politics. Does this consultant have sufficient reputation that I can use it as leverage in my internal business politics? Can this consultant navigate my company's business politics in order to further my business agenda? Can they produce the strategic documents/guidance to help me support my business goals?
3. Flexibility. Will this consultant work under terms that work for me? Will they put a consultant on a plane Monday? Or will they work remote? Are they willing to adjust the contract to meet a level of risk I find acceptable?
The process of choosing a consultant is mostly a business transaction between business professionals. The director of ACME's marketing department is typically in no position to evaluate the resumes of the proposed consulting development team. They're interested in getting their project done on time and on budget while minimizing risk. They're not stupid, they just have a wildly broader set of concerns than code quality.
If you get money thrown at you by VC’s, why not throw and exorbitant amount to a good friend as well...
Slightly worse than a coin toss, even after accounting for the inherent bias in a flipped coin :-)
Bad person does bad thing > prosecuted
Bad person tries to hide bad thing > prosecuted for that too
As far as I can tell, this is what a good justice system looks like.
1. Incompetent
2. Corrupt
I do not wish to accuse of either yet in this case, but this seems grossly unfair to what people like Aaron Swartz had to go through in comparison. I guess deep pockets if involved somehow have their cases either dragged on, turned away, justice never served at all. Consistently.
This holds for prosecution and defense, and the wealthy and the powerful, have the ability to sink massive resources into a court case, the best legal minds, possibly multiple of them, they generally have the ability to vastly manipulate the evidence, and generally have legal advice on what not to say, and avoid self incrimination.
On top of that, they will hammer the prosecutors office, to cross every t, and dot every i, and nail them in court if they don't. Not to mention the ability to file endless motions, continuances, etc...
So when it boils down to it, does the prosecutors office spend a massive percentage of their budget and man power on a single case, at the expense of tons of other cases that are seemingly straight forward? or do they cut them a deal.
A big case against the wealthy, has a high probability the prosecutors will fail to gain a conviction, it will have press, and losing will hurt the DA's chances for re-election.
When you break it down, the wealthy, will always have a massive advantage, they doesn't have to be any corruption, friends influencing the courts, etc... (though many have that too)
Its a battle of financial and time attrition, and the prosecutors have far less of it to dedicate to any single case, that a millionaire.
"For my friends everything, for my enemies the law"More details and further references on Wikipedia:
Pre-Covid, the narrative around drug companies was all about inflated insulin prices, the opioid epidemic manufactured by the Sackler family, and the profiteering exemplified by the likes of Martin Shkreli. The industry hadn't produced any truly high-profile successes in many years, and promising to reign in their worst excesses and get costs under control was politically popular.
Post-Covid, the drug industry are the cavalry heroically saving the day. They're no longer an attractive target for politicians looking to visibly battle the bad guys.
DOJ hasn’t stopped taking on major cases and if anything the WSJ journalist who was critical in uncovering the lies and wrote the book on Theranos could have had even more time to poke around.
Plus most importantly the VCs would be putting on a lot more pressure to see something real, something they could use ASAP.
So I could see this have the complete opposite pressure you imagine.
iirc, there is even a historic thread on HN where if you go back to the comments, its mostly people proving that there is almost certain fraud behind the scenes.
... they new the business was convincing enough to get a contract for blood testing with CVS, effectively lining it up to be a direct beneficiary of a not-insignificant portion of ACA funds for several years until the fraud came to the surface
in my view, holmes and the blood testing device are just the patsy/'fall guy' story - it's the higher up relations in connection with getting the CVS contracts that should be getting investigated