Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud | Hacker News Reader

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud

axios.com

110 pointsFireBeyond82 comments

It seems odd to me how she's being punished so much for defrauding investors, but not for endangering patients with fraudulent blood tests.

Is the latter just easier to prosecute because of the paper trail? Or is the law biased more towards punishing financial crimes?

Theranos raised $1B; FTX raised $2B. So we can assume that SBF gets 22yrs prison right?

Nope, probably much more since he isn't a female.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity

Downvoted for spitting out facts.

I guess we'll find out in a couple weeks: https://apnews.com/article/elizabeth-holmes-business-conspir...

I'd triangulate between Holmes and Madoff.

there's clear case of defrauding investors AND creditors. that's more than $2B + $8B disappeared into the void.

I thought they contracted that out to companies that did real blood testing.

because the prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests, and the testing agreements probably got the patients to agree if it didn't work they wouldn't rely on it.

prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests

I think it's more nuanced than that. Even if the prosecutors had mountains of evidence of harm to patients, defense attorneys have a lot of experience casting doubt on that kind of evidence making trail very tricky. My wife works in the medical/legal overlap and constantly sees stuff like "yes the patient spent 30 years working in an asbestos plant next to an industrial incinerator, but they smoked a cigarette once in the bathroom in high school so you can't say their cancer came from any one cause". And sometimes juries buy it.

But when you accumulate mountains of evidence that basically says "yeah, we know our stuff doesn't work...fake it till you make it, yo", you've got counterarguments like "we were just kidding" and "it's all fake" that isn't as resonate with the jury. So, the prosecution goes with the high-confidence charges.

Financial crimes are easier to prove. Same reason Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion.

Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. She got convicted for fraud because it was easy to prosecute, she got sentenced at least partially for cynically endangering peoples lives. There's clearly an argument that this is an abuse of the legal system, but she's not being singled out here.

People don't get convicted for doing bad things. They get convicted for breaking specific laws. In this case, the laws against defrauding investors were clearly broken, to the extent that a jury unanimously agreed they were broken. Whatever laws might have applied to the patients did not meet that bar.

I keep seeing a lot of "throw them in jail" posts here on HN and it's bad. It should be very hard for the state to jail someone. It should require extremely solid proof that they committed a crime which was defined in law. If we lose that principle, we revert from rule of law to rule of judges and mob rule. Some people like Holmes don't get punished in a way that satisfies everyone they hurt, and people like SBF might never get punished, and that's fine because lowering the burden of proof would only result in more injustice.

I think you're just throwing the trolley switch differently from me.

The fact that the law punishes defrauding investors, but not defrauding patients or employees, just shows that those laws are written by rich people, for rich people.

The law also punishes defrauding and harming patients. Prosecutors just didn't prove that actually occurred.

I can't believe she tried to get out of it by having babies. I feel for her kids, it's going to be really shit for them.

Isn't there a less cynical explanation, that she wanted to have children and, facing the prospect of over a decade in prison, that this was her last opportunity to have them?

That’s incredibly selfish on her part if that’s the case.

That’d be barely better, because the children would still suffer.

So she knew she was going to prison, and decided to bring kids in to the world to grow up without a mother? That's even worse.

Edit: typo

I think the father is pretty wealthy, I'm sure there will be some downsides but they will have a decently easy life.

Alright, that's enough internet for today, good night everybody.

Growing up rich without a mother is certainly better than growing up poor without a mother. I can attest to the latter, wouldn't wish it on anyone.

She could've had kids anytime, especially over the past 7 years. Looking at it now, it's hard to see it as anything but a manipulative attempt to delay the trial (and the strategy succeeded in buying her 3 months) and seek a more sympathetic sentence.

Getting pregnant at age 40 isn't easy, especially twice in less than two years. Highly likely both were IVF induced, the timing was just too perfect.

Plenty of women get pregnant at 40+ naturally. It might take more time and is higher risk of losing the baby, but no need to jump to any conclusion.

Yeah and she could have wanted to have kids at some point. Facing a period in prison that will take her past her fertile years, she had to make a decision.

Looks like the second plan she didn't really think all the way through...

Good point. There's always a lot of self-righteous judgment with these sort of things. Not trying to necessarily defend Ms. Holmes, but the objective reality is that no one knows her motivations.

That is one way to frame it, the other is that if she suspected that she was going to be going to prison for 10+ years she would be 48 on release and unlikely to be able to start a family. Dispite being a criminal, she is a human with human instincts and may have just wanted to actually have children?

That's not to say that having children just before going to prison for 10 years isn't cruel to those babies.

People are complex and often very flawed.

Edit:

To add, I have no sympathy for her, but the thought of being disconnected from my children for 10 years fills me with such fear that I imagine she has made her sentence even more torturous than it would have been.

If her kids don't end up resenting her for being absent for 10+ years, they will when they grow up enough to learn about everything she did.

I would rather have a prison mommy than not existed.

Yes, this could make for a fine, touching, family movie. Girl, Disrupter. For a plot twist, Elizabeth breaks out of the joint, leaving her daughters with the guard. "Can you watch them just for a second?"

By that rationale people should have as many children as physically possible because surely those children would prefer that to not existing?

"Little has been said about the innovation Elizabeth strived for"

What the hell is this quote? "Yeah, she defrauded people and lied to her customers, but guys, she really, really, really wanted it to work".

We might be talking about her striving if she had tried and failed. If she had tried and came close. But, no, that's not what happened. She claimed she did something she didn't, then took a lot of others' people money to build a business upon that lie.

So, no, we won't be talking about her "vision" or whatever.

Federal time also, so she will serve most of it. They offer 54 days credit per year for good behavior, which is much smaller than what you often see for state vs federal sentences.

At least one strange aspect of her biography that has always stood out to me is:

> During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.

That seems extremely suspicious and unlikely but I would love to learn more about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes#cite_note-Rog...

At the time, C++ compilers costing money was normal (Microsoft, Borland), and those were physical products (CD-ROMs, printed manuals), so it seems semi-plausible she could have acted as an intermediary with the help of her parents.

I was in high school around the same time as Holmes and recall using g++ as our compiler. This was on Linux, though.

I know. I wouldn’t put it past her being business-savvy enough to sell the Chinese g++. :)

My experience with Chinese universities was that they had their own ecosystem to "obtain" Western software. They didn't need an intermediary.

Might be true because Holmes has a pathological stupidity.

Yeah, was trying to find out more about that before, couldn't find anything. Now, the journalist wrote a followup about how he'd been mislead, and maybe that was part of the misinformation... but if it was it was a deeply weird thing to make up. Holmes is about the same age as me, and when I was in high school there were definitely free C++ compilers, even for Windows (I vaguely remember messing around with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJGPP, and Borland also had a shareware C++ compiler...)

> Holmes in January was found guilty of four charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Wikipedia has this short lay description of wire fraud:

> In layman's terms, anyone trying to scam other people or groups through any form of communication (paradoxically, even wireless) e.g., phones, instant messaging, email, or through writing, signs, pictures or sounds can be punished with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the scam involves a financial institution, the maximum fine is raised to 1 million US dollars and prison sentence not more than 30 years, or both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Wire_fraud

It sounds like the FTX crew might be facing similar charges at some point.

John Carreyrou's book about Theranos is absolutely riveting, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something suspenseful to read.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what happened to all of the Theranos hardware / technology after the company was shut down? e.g. the edison testing machines

I'll hop on here in a vain hope too.

I want to buy a Theranos Edison machine and am willing to pay. If you know anyone that has one, parts of one, or anything like that, my email is in my bio and I am very happy to talk to you.

I intend to take a small portion of it, melt it into steel ingots, and include it in 'Order of the Engineer' rings for myself and my colleagues who are also engineers.

We are looking for physical equipment in which engineers screwed up and the general public paid a high price for it, as a reminder to ourselves that our work is meaningful and is one of service to the people we serve with our efforts. If you know of any equipment that may fit that bill, I am looking to pay for that too.

I wonder if she did make any profits out of Theranos or was it all for nothing?

Good. She was a psychopath.

Still is I assume.

Was? She popped out to kids in the hopes she’d get off easy.

Seems oddly tragic.

Consequences are tragic? Certainly Holmes thinks so...

???

Indeed. The whole story is tragic and sad. What a waste of talent, money, and time. Not to mention the kids.

Of course she should still be accountable, but people get so caught up in the anger and vengeance aspect that they forget it is also sad.

The whole situation is regrettable and it would be better if it never happened.

Seems like she could have made a few right turns down a longer path and been a game changer. Obviously much of the tech seemed...wanting. The ability to enlist such powerful people in such an important mission was power gone to waste. At least she didn't waste it driving clicks.

Have we forgotten about the fact that Theranos had to void two years of blood test results? People were eventually going to get hurt by this lie. There were real crimes committed here, with real consequences for the perpetrators. It sucks for her children that their mother was found guilty of her crimes, that's no ones fault but her own.

They said it was a tragedy, not that it wasn't her fault.

Fair enough... but to me the story of a bad actor getting their come-uppance isn't all that tragic, as there's justice at the end of the story. I suppose one could consider Elizabeth Holmes as a tragic character in her story. Tragic optimism leading to a web of lies and deceit?

Yeah, my life philosophy is that it tragic when bad things happen, and while justice is appropriate, but doesn't eliminate that.

If someone commits murder and goes to jail, that isn't a happily ever after ending.

It is sad that victim is dead.

It is sad that the murderer is suffering.

It is sad that murderer was a fucked up person to begin with.

That is not to say they shouldn't be in prison, just that whole situation sucks and the world would be better off if it never happened.

There are literal murders in California serving a fraction of the time.

Very sad for anyone to go to prison in this country, which nearly never provides any healing or help.

It's mainly a punishment and deterrent here. As a society I think we are better off trying to stop other people from doing a similar crime than trying to rehabilitate her.

Scapegoating 101.

Just because her behavior was horrible doesn't mean she isn't a scapegoat.

Hold on, a scapegoat for _who_?

One could play the devil's advocate and argue that the investors were culpable for not doing their homework, and that the engineers allowed themselves to get carried away and not pay attention to what they were actually participating in.

Good, I feel bad for Balwani for getting caught up in her mess.

The part that sort of gets me here is that given that she wasn’t convicted of patient harm (questionable, but that’s the verdict), I don’t have any real interest in sending her to prison for defrauding investors. The investors were wealthy morons who invested with 0 research on the technical feasibility of the company. They deserved what they got. Do some due diligence next time.

11 years for defrauding "investors" who literally hoodwinked themselves and couldn't bother to do basic due diligence is egregious.

Hoodwink the entire public and nearly bring down the entire financial system, get a government bailout. Hoodwink a few rich investors, go to jail. Both at taxpayer expense.

white collar crime isn’t crime

That's not how law and justice work.

"The home owner has been a prick to his neighbours anyway, the guy who robbed him shouldn't have been sent to prison"

That's what I don't get about this case. It looks like she ticked off few politicians.

Playing with investors money is literally abc of startups.

I don't understand this case at all

Defrauding rich people is much more legally dangerous than murdering poor people through deliberate negligence.

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