Elizabeth Holmes 'gave me gobbledygook answers' back in 2014
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
> He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.
Highly recommend reading his book that gives a detailed account on how he went about taking on Theranos: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood
And it likely is happening again, someone who is being heralded now will be exposed and we'll go through this important exercise again. My money is on Musk's number coming up.
It is a pity that charlatanry seems so profitable of late. It's always been around and in some respects you can admire a con artist's cleverness, but to me there's a difference between fleecing some investors looking to make a quick buck and trying to do the same to the public.
The whole "stepping on a single nail vs. sleeping on a bed of nails" metaphor.
Would the world really be a better place if we viewed every failure as disqualifying?
The dude makes over-optimistic predictions and shitposts like crazy; we're hardly talking about Pol Pot here. The same personality holds for, what, 90% of Reddit? Maybe only 40% of the HN commenter base (we're cultured!). People hate Musk because Musk makes it so fun to hate him. And that's fine. But it leads to some pretty weird places if you let it (like "The world would be better off without Tesla or SpaceX" being discussed here).
Look, it's fine if you don't like the guy or his companies. But some of the ridiculous talking points listed elsewhere in this thread are unhinged.
And once that effect of the worthwhile mission wears off, people seem to run away. Not walk. Run.
In other words, I don't think "Musk-hatred" is an ideology.
Of course that means that Musk's contribution is in fact not so much different from your average business blowhard. "Inspiring". Musk is just better at it, although a significant portion of it is simply in the mission itself, not musk. His nerd look and talk is entirely manufactured and an act (it's fake, as opposed to Larry Page. His nerd act is not an act, a fact he spent millions trying to get away from)
Both companies were effectively started by engineers, not by Elon Musk. There are no real technical accomplishments that are his doing.
I would say he has a good bullshit filter ... but there's a hyperloop in there, along with the boring company. Ahem.
I've never seen anything genius level out of Musk. He likes to think he's a genius and he's not dumb but actually genius? No.
And if there is billions of easy money to be made in carbon credits everyone would be doing that too.
It's crazy difficult to do what he's done. That's why there are so few companies worth so much money.
None of his original ideas have been successful. Tesla and SpaceX were not originally his, and SpaceX arguably owes more to Shotwell and government money than Musk.
There are so many people in Silicon Valley who would be more effective users of billions of dollars than Musk. Such a waste.
"a talent for working through hardware manufacturing issues" can be genius depending on exactly how good one is.
Did he provide any groundbreaking designs himself?
Or are you referring to his salesmanship skills?
Or maybe the existing / new Tesla folks did a lot of the work, like the founders that were ousted by him, but didn’t really get the credit, because Musk wants to be seen as this genius Tony Stark type of inventor.
And dont you think being at the right time and place had something to do with with Teslas initial success, ie the other car manufacturers didn’t really focus or push EVs and Musk had a good marketing idea to place EVs as one solution to combat climate change (yet he actively tried to derail a high speed rail project, which tells me he doesn’t really care about climate change).
When I hear the word genius… I think of Einstein, Newton or Hawking… ppl who use their creative mind and imagination to introduce something completely new and paradigm shifting to the world.
I don’t think that’s what he has done. He used his money to invest in existing ideas and help accelerate them, by using his audience building and marketing skills… so yes he deserves credit for that.
But I would like to be proven wrong, hence why I’d like to know about concrete examples which you think classify Elon as a genius.
I know he’s polarizing, but he deserves a large amount of credit for Tesla’s success making ev’s mainstream and SpaceX’s success creating reusable rockets. These are certainly up there as major accomplishments from corporate America in the past 20 years (longer most likely).
Tesla’s market cap may get cut by 80% at some point to be more in line with auto manufacturers; SpaceX may eventually have other competition; and if he’s forced to go through with Twitter it might cause financial and reputational harm to him, but is there anything like Holmes on the horizon?
I’m no fanboy of Musk, but even his harshest critics have to acknowledge that his business successes are real and meaningful (assuming you believe any business successes can be meaningful).
Ps yes, he does seem like a jerk a lot of the times, but that’s different than being a fraud.
Basically, the rockets being real doesn't prove that FSD isn't a scam. And FSD being a scam doesn't prove the rockets aren't real.
On the topic of FSD, I think that could be a fair answer for “why is Musk a fraud?” but that would require a follow up question: is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work and are lying when they say it will? If yes that seems like fraud and therefore the parent comment would end up being right about Elon’s number. But if he genuinely believes they’re going to get there and they’re wrong about the timing? That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?
It could be unethical to keep on saying it’ll be here soon and not delivering, and based on some of his behavior you can certainly make the case he may be unethical, but I guess I think the bar for being a fraud or even called a fraud is or ought to be higher (like Theranos or Nikola or Enron or MCI, the list goes on).
They must know it would never have worked in the timeline they gave for it. Elon Musk got on stage and told people it would be fiscally irresponsible not to buy his cars because his cars would earn passive income as robo-taxis. There was simply no way that was going to happen and most people who weren't fanboys already thought it a risible claim. They aren't even close to level 5 and they knew it. Years later and they still aren't close to it.
Now, could you prove in court this was fraud and not just moronic optimism? Maybe, maybe not. That probably depends on what they were foolish enough to put in writing where legal discovery might find it. But personally I don't see a shred of reasonable doubt; it was fraud plain and simple. He knew these claims were bullshit but knew self driving cars were hype so he shamelessly exploited that hype to sell cars.
There is fraud in the legal sense and the colloquial sense. If I describe myself as a genius programmer, but am actually quite below average, I'm probably not legally on the hook for fraud, but me peers might call my one.
Similarly if you continually claim year after year that full self driving is a year away your either clueless about how long it'll take and how difficult a problem it is, while also being too clueless to realize how clueless you are (despite being so consistently wrong), and a colloquial fraud, or you know darn good and well that your claims are wrong and are just putting them out there to boost your stock price (potentially legal fraud).
> It's never going to wear out. It's made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime
He does credit for being such a charismatic charlatan and somehow managing to fool most of the world and being a social media and tech darling based on nothing but lies and empty promises. Tesla's valuation comes from a large part from Musks constant lies that FSD was a solved problem and was just around the corner, every ear since 2016. Every time he said that, he got more fanatics, and the stock surged.
SpaceX is almost fully funded by DoD and Musk has acknowledged the end goal is to use it for military purposes.
All his other ideas like Hyperloop/Boring company, the recently released private tweets with his billionaire friends, getting fired by his own board, clearly expose him as someone who doesn't really understand technology let alone be a 'genius'. More like an idiot.
He was born rich, got lucky and somehow people buy into his myth.
And yes, he is a fraud. He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade, charging for alpha code that kills people and lying about it. Its not the same level of fraud as Holmes but Musk was never honest about it either.
Interesting, my Tesla feels pretty real.
There are also claims of games being played with Tesla options at the direction of Elon, though that area is less clear to me.
Maybe it's just a case of what he is doing is a dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand. And that would mean things don't go the way he planned a significant amount of the time (perfectly normal). And that includes the whole spectrum of business operations -> investors, funding/finance, marketing, technology, distribution, supply chains etc.
I know from the comfort of our desk chair (with no risk taken, no relevant experience, no nothing really) and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we can make these criticisms but really they dont mean much.
Jobs and Bezos fell into this category, they just underpromised and overdelivered, not the opposite.
I'm going to assume you lack the background and expertise to make any meaningful assessment of these businesses in the general sense, let alone with regard to specific challenges they each faced.
And even if true, the opposite of under-promising and over-delivering is not "immense amounts of fraud".
Musk has barely signed off anything, he's constantly postponing the moment when he'll sign off quality of life, but he's getting paid right now.
Today has been a slow day and I used the various different flavors of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft so many times. They might not be a colony on Mars, but at least they are real.
Equating Musk with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos investigation is completely unhinged and speaks more about your ideological preferences than anything else.
I've actually never heard someone make an informed analysis about a topic, and then spend their breath deriding people with different views. I believe when people have conviction in their analysis, they generally feel secure presenting it and letting it stand on it's own.
But the folks who want to rationalize their beliefs need to constantly tell you about how factual and logical they are, and how the people who disagree with them are the opposite.
Newton / Leibniz would like a word
People are people. The decisions those people made throughout their lives, that led to the behaviour that we might lament, are also the decisions that led to their world-changing discoveries.
Rivalry has value.
I don't see how a "rivalry" that destroyed Libniz' career was useful; the discoveries you're celebrating had already been made. Rivalry may have value, though in my mind it remains to be seen, but backstabbing certainly doesn't.
> Theranos employees once reportedly chanted, “Fuck you, Carreyrou,” at an all-hands meeting in October of 2015.
> At a company party, Theranos employees played a video game modeled after Atari's Space Invaders: The gun was the miniLab, the bullets the nanotainers and the invader being shot at: Yours Truly!
I know it's fashionable to hate the press, but when it escalates to this level of vitriol it smells of "The lady doth protest too much".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/13/17234844/theranos-sp...
We need more journalists like John. There is a shortage of journalists that would stand up for facts even if that meant going against the whole world.
It seemed to tick up really sharply in late 2015, which seems to be when Carreyrou decided to pick up the story. This started coinciding with Holmes going on publicity tours talking about new partnerships she had brokered with various pharmacies and other companies. I don't really think it hit the general public consciousness until mid 2016 when the wheels really started coming off. By then Carreyrou really just seemed to be a public face for a lot of people who had more or less figured it out -- except he was really trying to get at the bottom of the "why" it felt bad.
Edit, responding to comment below: Of course people inside Theranos knew about something fishy, a few people outside were rumouring about it. But the suggestion that Carreyrou "jumped" on it in 2015 is false. Completely.
This doesn't preclude other people independently suspecting something was wrong. Indeed, many of the people Carreyrou talked to thought something smelled fishy. People in the original HN threads thought so too, as did Phyllis Gartner.
It's one thing to say "Hey, this self-driving car thing seems a bit far-fetched." It's quite a different thing to get the engineers working on it to admit that the facts are untrue. (Not saying that's the case, just a likely example).
https://web.archive.org/web/20221021205719/https://finance.y...
In case anyone else was having an issue
Maybe for a journalist with an organization backing them (paying the legal expenses), but generally speaking people aren't ethically obliged to pick legal fights with those richer and more powerful than them.
The willingness of people to do the right thing at their own risk for the benefit of others is part of what makes civilization work.
And if your failure to remark might be seen by others as approval, then I think it can rise to an ethical obligation. If you become known for being competent about anything in particular it can be hard to avoid situations where you silence isn't seen as approval.
Why even reply on HN? It may be adverse to your wellbeing in the future, and doesn't confer any particular benefit to you today.
I am of the view that people claiming others have an ethical obligation to report these things are making this claim from a position of safety that is not shared by the person they are advising.
Maybe they could've written another piece. I'm sure they invested a fair bit of time into learning what they did to write the piece they had.
At any rate, none of that matters. The ancestor post that matters was:
> "First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
I disagree with that statement for all of the reasons I have mentioned. In fact, all I did was point out that you were being obtuse, either intentionally or otherwise, because you couldn't make the analogy-leap from "death by trolley" to "your life is now only about this lawsuit and all of your other interests must be ignored for 6-14 months".
> So, just so I get this right: you and MichaelCollins are of the view that anyone who criticizes a corporation is a member of a "death cult"?
No. Those are the words of another commenter. My thinking that it's laughable that people pretend they don't know how analogies work does not logically imply that I share the views of the person that happened to encourage you to demonstrate it.
Anyway, I think he's conceptually right. I wouldn't use the phrase "death cult." Not because there's anything wrong with it - it's just not in my regular vernacular.
The film Fyre Fraud might interest you. The subjects discuss how they felt pressured to "make it work" at Fyre Festival (a different fraud) even as they understood the window of possibility was rapidly diminishing.
The employees knew they had the product and had various vantage points about how well it worked - but none of them knew what promises Elizabeth was making or how poorly the entire product performed
The last who knew the most were the executives, the top two of which were just convicted
If not, they failed as a journalist, and then to try to bring this up after the fraud was known to get credit is even worse.
> “John Carreyrou did a brilliant job of exposing Elizabeth Holmes — I did not.” Auletta reflected. “So, when I look back on that, yeah, I did a profile of her, but I did not produce the goods that he did.”
He didn't blow the case open, but reported on it as well as he could have, given libel laws.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler