Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that's an unjust outcome; the "lenient" option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.
Edit
I tracked down the prosecutor's sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.
Later edit
The PSR (the court's own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P
But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790880
Later later edit
I'm doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.
* long history of family and social support (presumably predictive of lower risk of recidivism, higher cost to relations)
* "collateral punishments" (I think? this refers to civil cases)
* Holmes' personal experience with trauma.
So that's roughly how it works, I guess: you apply the guidelines to get a level, which gives you a maximum, and then you mitigate the maximum in a variety of ways.
Oh give me a fucking break. Every criminal has experience with trauma. This is the first time I've seen that brought up to justify a particular sentence.
Given the nature of her crime, wouldn't strong unwavering familial and social support increase the risk of recidivism? Like, if she was guaranteed to be shunned by all, she would be at 0 risk of it.
By the way, the whole video is interesting.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of this being a consideration. Someone had trauma in their life so they get a lenient sentence for defrauding people out of money?
Maybe this isn’t consistently applied across states and gender.
Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.
Wow - that’s some high level not-giving-a-shit about other humans (the kids). Or even more cynical, sociopathically using kids/pregnancy to try to get a reduced sentence?
We'll have to check back in 9.35 years to see if that part is accurate
I used to be a pretty damned good lawyer (if I do say so myself), but I never practiced federal criminal law, so I have to admit that was pure gut feeling and general lawyerly instincts. :)
I mean, the 9 served thing is a little easy, since it follows mechanically from the actual sentence (also, it'll be 10 served, not 9).
This former federal prosecutor does not think so:
> Anyone who claims Holmes received more or less than what she was “supposed to get” does not understand federal sentencing. I served for almost seven years as a federal prosecutor, led dozens of sentencings and co-authored a nationwide guide to prosecutors on the topic, and I couldn’t predict with any confidence what sentence Holmes would receive.
> Indeed, 10 different federal judges would have likely imposed 10 different sentences on Holmes. That’s both a function of the general process and of Holmes’ particular case. She didn’t face a mandatory minimum sentence (meaning the judge was not required to impose a prison term), while her maximum sentence under the relevant statutes for her offense was 80 years (20 years for each of the four wire fraud counts of conviction).
[...]
> Common sense and a dose of perspective show that Holmes shouldn’t spend more than a decade in prison, let alone 15 years. [...] In other words, her crime was serious, but prosecutors can point to no dead body or even serious bodily injury, though the risk was real. [...] At this point the overriding question should be about the prospect of rehabilitation. Holmes can be a productive member of society. The judge, while not sentencing her to as much prison time as he could have, should have shown more leniency.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elizabeth-holmes-sente...
This seems a bit weird to me.
If one engages in behavior that creates real bodily risk for people, that ought to be the crime. The probability of injury that was created, not the outcome. If it just so happens that the dice landed in a way that didn’t harm anyone, that doesn’t tell us anything about her intention, how dangerous it is to have her out in society.
Especially for white collar crimes, where the execution of the risk is often set up in such a manner that the perpetrator isn’t there for the injury. If somebody breaks into a gas station and tries to rob the place with a weapon, but at the critical moment doesn’t actually hurt anyone, that’s still obviously very serious, but we can infer that they have some little bit of conscience that spoke up when it was most needed. Not so for the person who set up a dangerous abstract process that just happened to not hurt anyone by coincidence.
Ian Gibbons
White collar crime should be punished to the utmost degree. These are usually people that had everything given to them to live a legitimate, educated, and safe life, and they blew it all due to greed and ego. Most non- “white collar” criminals didn’t have that chance to start with. And white collar crime usually affects a multitude of people over periods of years. It’s not like most other crimes that happen on much smaller timescales with a lot more emotion involved. White collar crime usually means someone is waking up every day for years saying “yep, I’m still gonna keep doing this”.
- wire fraud (3 counts): 7
- victims (10+): 2
- damages ($140M): 24 (!!)
- sophisticated means: 2
- leading role: 4
- abuse of public trust: 2
- obstruction of justice: 2
TOTAL: 43
And here's[1] the chart. Even for first time offenders, penalty can be life.
[1] https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/direct-uploads...
Mandatory minimums are obviously a different story.
If someone told me I was going to jail for a a week, it would be bad.
I’d someone told me I was having a week added to my 10 year sentence, I’m not sure if care that much.
This appears to be a very ruthless hatchet job. It appears the elites set a trap and imploded her company. It appears her chief scientist Ian Gibbons was poisoned. The media said he died of suicide by tylenol poisoning. Very odd because that’s the worst way to go and Ian was a distinguished engineer and scientist who had his choice of where he wanted to work.
No one wants to talk about the board of directors either, given that these people were so well known and influential this seems… odd.
All her patents were gobbled up by the investors and her company imploded right before covid19 hit.
Even if her machines were only half functioning it would have been nice to have them on every walgreens and walmart in the age of a pandemic.
I feel very sorry for her. I’m probably the only one who thinks she’s a victim here. She tried to make the world a better place and give you access to your own health information. And because she made so mis statements that is typical of a “fake it till you make it” she now has to rot in prison and her children have to go without a mother.
I find this absolutely disgraceful. She would not have been so hyped if it weren’t for the media. They will of course never face any consequences. They get off scott free to pump and dump the next victim.
When do we break this cycle?
Edit to clarify: My statement is more intended to emphasize how overly punishing possession charges rather than to advocate for draconian charges for all offenses.
It seems like this sentence (like many others in our judicial system) is based more on retribution than anything else.
Conveniently:
Vice President (at the time) Biden, knew Elizabeth and even visited Theranos.
Elizabeth Holmes held fundraisers for Hillary Clinton with Chelsea Clinton.
Just recently, a prominent Democrat Senator was asking for leniency on her sentencing.
I would be supremely surprised if she is not pardoned before the end of Biden's term(s).
The average time served for murder in the US is about 13 years - just a bit longer than Holmes’ sentence.
> "The only reason that he plead guilty is because the culture in office and it threatened Mr. Wilson with mandatory sentences that were more than 10 years," said Descano.
Kalief Browder was imprisoned for three years without trial on the accusation that he stole a backpack[2]. After three years, a judge told him he could plead guilty and walk free, or go to trial and risk being imprisoned for 15 years.
I get the feeling authorities lie a lot to get someone to plead guilty. It seems like over 90% of cases in the U.S. end in a plea deal. Everyone agrees that threatening to break someone's leg to force a confession is a gross violation of justice, but somehow it's fine to threaten to take away decades of their life to force them to confess.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-firefighter-to-be-released-fr... [2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
Checks out.
It's pretty insane to me still spending a year in prison for possession. Since I come from a country where possession has always be decriminalized, just thinking that some of my behavior could land me in jail is mind bending.
Poor people cannot afford to defend themselves, so they make easy targets for incarceration.
Wealthy or connected people take much more time and effort to imprison, so the risk vs reward for prosecutors is just not worth it in most cases. You have to _really_ piss off or embarrass a lot of powerful people to get taken down like this current case.
Source? I checked wikipedia and it suggests that it was the other way around. The article on war on drugs also doesn't show much developments around the 80s. Most of the changes were in the 70s.
We fail to reflect that 11 years in prison is a really long and miserable time.
Especially if it's perpetrated with a car.
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
A typical median families income was approx. $70k in 2021. That covers multiple people, and in general across the US is enough to pay for housing, schooling, medical care, etc.
A lifetime of that (inflation adjusted) is usually enough for someone to retire somewhere.
If you take the 48 years from 18 to social security retirement age of 66, that would make a median lifetimes earnings $3,360,000 in 2021 dollars.
Holmes got nearly $1bln from investors in the Theranos mess, which is 297 lifetimes worth of median earnings, which considering that directly maps to someone (or multiple someones) working hard for that time, can be consider ‘life’s works’.
She was convicted of fraud on at least $140 million of wire transfers out of that, or ‘only’ 41 life’s works.
While 11 years is a long time, the destruction of value done is nothing to scoff at.
With decent leadership, 300 people working for their entire lives could accomplish a lot of great things.
Of course, it could also be blown on crypto scams and lambos. It’s not a perfect comparison.
But on the other side, what are the incentives (to future criminals) to try pull off fraud of this magnitude. There's obviously various psychological effects playing out here (as well as circumstantial ones, great idea goes pear-shaped but it's seemingly too late to pull-out due to ego/sunkcost/other fallacies/last minute save).
But has anyone attempted a game-theoretic payoff matrix, I'm just wondering in the wider scheme of things (to loop back in the post I'm replying to about 11years feeling light) will this kind of sentence actually deter any future similar cases from happening or are the payoff's (financial or otherwise) just too high for this to apply any real deterrent threat to those who are likely to be in the position to be influenced by it?
So in reality, actually this is just really a punishment?
That is to say, there is no quantitative to compare harm from billions of fraud to getting kids hooked on crack.
They gave her a sentence that's a little below the federal sentencing guidelines but not by a huge amount.
It would be good to stop pushing this kind of misinformation (yeah I know war on drug bad)
Aka don't mess with rich people.
Same with SBF.
Just garnish their income for life or until they make their victims whole.
Wasn't she trying to raise money for a start-up while on trial?
> Same with SBF
Isn't he trying to raise money right now?
But there is still deterrence purpose of punishment - if you remove prison from considerations, it significantly changes risk calculations for white collar crime making it much more profitable.
The whole thread is an interesting read in retrospect, quite a mix of effusiveness and skepticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
In just about every other field or industry, a 10% improvement every decade is amazing and represents the combined efforts of tens of thousands of researchers. A 2x improvement is a once-in-a-lifetime revolution that will be backed my mountains of joint; and 10x (like Theranos promised) completely unheard of.
This also functions as a great BS detector - breakthroughs of the scale Theranos claimed just don't happen out of nowhere - there would be thousands of peer reviewed papers leading up to it.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and Theranos didn't even offer an ounce of it.
this person HAD to be an insider, no question.
But, there was/is a reddit thread that, without naming the company, originally asked is it normal for a company be "pumping numbers" in the medical field. It was an an engineer/scientist who asked it years before anything public. A number of commenters guessed it was Theranos, eventually the poster came back to confirm the suspicions while expounding on the whole experience.
Nah, that's doubtful. I've seen plenty of posts on HN and elsewhere that held the same sentiment. MANY people said that what they were trying to do was very difficult and they did not do anything to prove they had any technical advances to do it. The company was shady and overly secretive in a really strange way. The board was inappropriate for a biotech company.
Everyone with a background in biology or microfluidics said these things. It wasn't hard to find.
That's why I was so surprised when they partnered with Walgreens. I thought at the time that Walgreens must know something that the public didn't.
I think these two cases are sort of parallels: people assumed that someone was a genius to such an extent that they disregarded any signs of fraud and sought little proof of the assertions being made.
It's not surprising that the one she got got for was the one where she hurt rich people.
Federal sentencing guidelines for wire fraud of the size that Ms. Holmes was convicted of recommend 20 years in prison. Ms. Holmes’s lawyers had asked for 18 months of house arrest, while prosecutors sought 15 years and $804 million in restitution for 29 investors."
For the rest of the population without money, power or connections accused of drug crimes or petty theft it's typical that you will be arrested and placed in jail immediately and will be in custody until you are convicted / sentenced at which point you will go directly to prison.
This allows the person sentenced to get their affairs in order.
I know somebody who is sentenced for 10 years. The court gave him 2 months which actually is not enough for all the items he need to wrap up. To give an idea, this person needs to:
- sell his house (who will pay the mortgage now that he is in prison) - sell his car - donate / get rid of his clothes and most of his belongings (or leave them in care of family / storage) - cancel all the subscriptions and utilities - take care of any medical needs - inform all the people who might reach out to him so they can communicate with him - more…
On the correction system side, they also need time to figure out where to send this person and create the space there: - If the person sentenced has any medical needs they will ask for a “medical” facility (connected to a hospital) and usually nicer. - the person sentenced might request a correction facility that is closer to his loved ones (the guy I know requested and going to a facility in Texas even though he lives in Florida as his closest relative is his sister who lives near that facility) - other factors include doing tests / analysis to figure out should the person go to level 1 security (minimum) or something higher; is the person considered a risk to other inmates? are other inmates considered a risk to this person (common for cops, sexual offenders etc)
Of course, if the person is considered a flight risk or violence risk - they will just send him/her to the nearest county jail and then figure out the rest.
Overall, a lot of logistics and consideration is given to an inmate - specially in a federal system.
Second, for the prison facility to make sure there’s a free space for the incoming person.
Edit: Someone pointed out she’s pregnant, so there’s that…
pdf - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
~Five months from now seems long. Is that a common delta between sentencing and prison?
I shall pay, of course. For you, sir, you can either give directly to Lighthouse Ministries (lfrad.org), or if you want to be sure it's tax-deductible, you can give to Martha's Kitchen in San Jose with a note that it's intended for Lighthouse. (They're a tax-exempt in California but their IRS 501(c)(3) hasn't come through yet.) Martha's acts as financial sponsor for them, which has some legal significance I don't quite understand.
Side note, I previously worked with nonprofit fiscal sponsors - basically Martha's uses their (c)(3) to incubate specific initiatives like Lighthouse and handle all of their compliance / HR / legal for a small fee on the donations.
================= Thank You for Your Donation!
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I see the gleaner from Lighthouse all the time while walking the dog, so that's how I know them. Founded by a three-strikes guy!
I agree that her actions were egregious, but those weren't what the trial was about. The trial was about defrauding investors, not about defrauding customers.
I don't know if there is a separate trial about that, or if it's too hard to proof harm in an individual case, or if nobody ever bothered. Hard to get money out of a failed company.
Yeah, f@ck the customers. In the Capitalistic utopia of the USA, you cannot be allowed to embarrass the oligarchy, whether they work in private equity, the Fortune 100, or the military-industrial complex. They really are between a rock and a hard place with Holmes. She's obviously psychopathic enough to raise ungodly amounts of money, whatever the cost, but she embarrassed the wrong kind of people. So we wind up with a moderate sentence that means she will do hard time (to scare people away from outright fraud), but not too much (so she will be able to get back into the game after).
Holmes defrauded a few dozen investors that quite honestly should’ve known better.
Hard to see why stealing billions of your customers money to spend gambling and buying personal items then lying about it multiple time isn't a bigger crime than what those two were sentenced for.
Martin basically ASKED for prison. Instead of apologizing, or claiming ignorance, he sort of doubled down on arrogance. Homles did largely the same thing. She doubled down.
SBF is apologizing left and right, claiming ignorance, and admitting that he made a mistake (even if it was 100% intentional). That goes a long way. Longer than you'd think. Most of the people he defrauded have little power over him. SBF knows how to play the game. He's been playing it since Day 1.
When in doubt, lie. But keep your lies consistent. A good lie is easier to believe than the truth. Because if you believe it, they believe it.
The interesting thing politically is if this will be enforced or not, as I am sure there are a lot of Silicon valley founders worrying now. At best they will get some deserved extra scrutiny, at worse will be getting investigated.
I've seen talk about Holmes' political connections, but she surely is too toxic for them to get her a "free pass". She might get relief from somewhere else though?
Hell of a thing to do to a kid.
I mean, it definitely also garners sympathy with the judge, but it'd be totally reasonable for her to do it just because she wanted kids.
Thanks for bringing up that perspective.
Was it this?
> Holmes admitted on the stand that Theranos was running blood tests on modified third-party machines without telling its business partners and that she added the logos of two pharmaceutical companies to studies that the company sent to investors.
This seems like everyday, standard startup procedure. Was there a lot more?
Not much even German engineers can do about that.
This type of people prey on the ingenuous and naive, nothing wrong with being ingenuous but for the rest of us, we should also call out the predators like Holmes and try to keep this predators out of society.
Holmes had a vision of a business model. She explained her business model and brought on a board of directors of leering old farts. Investors also believed in the vision and invested in her to achieve the vision. She tried to achieve her vision, but failed miserably. Instead of telling investors and regulators and business partners about the failure, she hid the failure, covered up by using industry standard practices for medical testing, passing them off as testing from her products. As a cherry on the top, she also used her comically in-accurate products to give actual test results to patients. As a cherry on top of the cherry, all the while this was happening, she had an affair with another investor, went on a PR blitz of fame whoring and the like.
When the chickens came to roost, she pitched up her voice, started wearing feminine colorful dresses, got pregnant for sad puppy new mom face points.
She is a psychopath and a danger to society.
Comparing Holmes to Neumann is an insult to even Neumann.
holmes deserves punishment on some level, certainly, although honestly i feel 10+ years might be a bit much.
where is this zeal for her male analogues? they’re all playing the same game.
I am. I have.
Still me me me. Narcissist.
This is one of the things that made me a bit angry when reading some of the letters of support to Holmes today, and her own statement. That is, so much of it still carried on with the fantasy that "Holmes was close, but just fell short".
No, she didn't fall short. Her own lust for recognition and power blinded her to the physical realities of what was possible, harming investors, employees and patients in the process.
I'm actually a bit surprised at the outcome - 11 years seems like a fair and justified sentence for what she perpetrated.
They were often running tests on competitors machines. They either passed those results off as coming from their machines, or validated their own results using competing machines.
Their machine could not do what it promised with the amount of blood it claimed to use and was no better than proven machines, and arguably worse as they had lot of maintenance issues even operating at their HQ.
That is not how justice works. Each case must be taken by itself. So gross how people throw around this "sends a message!" bullshit so flippantly when it clearly means "the punishment will not fit the crime as we have added a bunch on to scare other people".
Get a fine for speeding or littering and it will have no relation to the damage you did.
All of this is opinionated since quantifying justice is often pretty difficult.
She (possibly) gets pregnant during the first trial to garner sympathy. Even if you have a charitable interpretation of this only the worst of the worst narcissistic sociopaths decide to "start a family" when they're potentially facing 15 years in Federal Prison. She's currently pregnant with her second child.
Now those kids get to grown up without a mother and live the rest of their lives with the knowledge or at least suspicion they're in this world because their con-artist mother was trying to manipulate the justice system.
Even IF you take the approach that she thought big and failed, doing no real wrong the situation with her pregnancies (in my mind) isn't up for debate. On this issue alone I find her completely reprehensible.
In terms of fertility window - too bad. This is one of the many things she should have been thinking of while conducting her fraud over the past decades. Not everyone should be a parent. She also has the resources to do things like freeze eggs, etc. I know that's not a guarantee but plenty of men have children at 50 and it doesn't seem terrible for the kids.
While the children will be better off than parents with fewer resources this is an almost guaranteed "years of therapy" situation for these poor kids.
Judges don't convict people - juries do and I think it's been demonstrated she's very calculating and conniving. If there was even a remote chance she could skate free based on one juror holding out on a conviction based on her family situation she would take it (and did). It just didn't work and the kids will be the ones paying for it.
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201510/kimberly-weisul/the-long...
Her reasons for getting pregnant are solely and exclusively selfish.
If we follow this sentencing as a guide for future cases brought against SBF & co, should we expect 1 mo per $MM defrauded, so 8,000 months, or 666 years(!) ? Or should we look at it like 45mo per investor defrauded, so 45,000,000 months?
Either way, I think this is probably a fair sentence and more than I expected. 11.25 years isn't trivial, and as long as there isn't some early release or she wins a more lenient sentence on appeal, it's going to be a painful 11 years, especially since she's about to be a new mother. Feel bad for the kid..
But:
There is such a thing as a prison consultant. You pay for them before you go in. These are people with some background in the bureau of prisons, or some pull, or something. They can steer you to a "good" prison, if the one you're designated for is not what you want. My friend was supposed to go to one near his house, and he preferred a different one. He got it. It was not a country club, contrary to the stereotype. (Should be unnecessary to say this, but I'm not going to provide any more details.)
The guy in that video said that they could be pissed off at her, and ship her across the country to West Virginia, instead of Dublin, CA. The thing about that you wouldn't think of is, those trips are hell. It's a special flight, It might stop eight times on the way, and every step of the way you're cuffed or chained, waiting a long time for the next flight.
i look forward to returning to HN in september 2032 and seeing what what sort of cope is on display when she's released after 9.5 years. will we have holmes-prison truthers? "she was never in prison, it was a body double the whole time!".
it'll be fascinating.
How does that work? Usually I thought after your trial, at sentencing... that's it, you go away in handcuffs
She was a fraud and misled everyone in a big way: investors, patients, etc…
White collar crime needs to be punished. Or “held accountable for”
ONLY guilty of defrauding investors - not guilty of defrauding patients.
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
Which makes me wonder - if your product is not defrauding customers, then how is it that you are defrauding investors ...
I believe a distinction is being made where Theranos the company is understood to have defrauded customers but it cannot be proven that Holmes directly defrauded all customers. Where it can be proven that she directly defrauded investors given she was aware of the fraud against customers.
If we are to place bets and speculate, I would bet no one was actually killed by this.
But I'm not trying to argue this is a fair sentence. Just saying that we don't need to keep throwing random speculative argument with hypothetical crimes years later.
I don't think there is any price if you end up making it.
The primary purpose of imprisonment is to keep dangerous (i.e, violent) offenders off the street. Violence is especially bad because it is difficult for the government to prevent all violence, so drastic measures like prison make sense.
It is fairly straightforward to stop holmes from doing what she did again using other means.
I dunno, just my take. And yes, I feel this way about most white collar crime. Like it or not, white collar crime is not violent; thus prison seems pointless and like a waste of money.
Actually, nobody is really sure what its purpose is.
Why do parents, when they get really angry, sometimes hit a child? Psychology has proven that doing so is a really terrible way of preventing further infractions. So the impulse to punish is not necessarily rational.
A whole religion has been built on the idea of consciously letting go of the urge to judge and punish - and it hasn’t worked out for 2000 years.
So one reason why the government punishes criminals is to take the wind out of the sails of all the private parties that otherwise would cry for punishment of that person, or take it into that own hands. In that sense, it is essentially a power move by the state in order to remain in control and “keep the peace”.
There's always a touch of dishonesty in these ventures -- it's so-called risk -- but when a company no longer is worth anything, how is that supposed to fail blamelessly?
It's a wonder that "Computer (occupation)"[0] never became a corporation with unions so that we'd have a case study of something that clearly should have gone by the wayside with the advent of technology.
Maybe there are some guidelines for business models that even make sense. Apparently Theranos illustrates that "accusing everyone else of being a lazy liar with stagnant investment" isn't workable either.
Was this even in the realm of possibility?
What lead her to start this company? Was it 90% scam, 10% "trying" or just 100% scam?
Thanks!
Then there was the whistle blower Tyler Schultz. He got roughed up by Theranos lawyers at his own grandfathers house. His grandfather was George Schultz former US Sec of State and Theranos board member. The lawyers wanted him to admit he gave away “trade secrets”. The trade secret is Holmes and everyone at Theranos belong in prison.
https://www.fraud-magazine.com/cover-article.aspx?id=4295006...
The Dropout https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10166622/
After that, 10 mins of Alex Gibney's doco The Inventor will likely be enough, just to see and hear the creepy reality.
> Was this even in the realm of possibility?
Apparently not even in the realm of possibility. It seems she had a vision of herself as a genius who changed the world, and lived in that bubble. Still does, it seems.
Even after reading Bad Blood, the series really shows you how it looked, how such a thing was even possible, and went on for so many years. It's such a crazy story. I do feel sorry for Sonny though.
11 years is too much for Holmes, people have done much worse and gotten a lot less than that.
My guess is the sets of people who lost money on Theranos and those who lost money on FTX don't intersect at all, the former is made of rich people and the latter of everyday people, so it makes more sense...
Poor child though, but I don’t think it would be less poor growing up with such a person as their mum.
Let me guess, Sunny gets 20
Also, not sure what you’re on about re: failing to make introduction. She claimed to have revolutionary blood tests that worked, but they were useless and she knew it. It was blatant lying and fraud to the tune of millions of dollars. Not to mention all the doctors and patients who thought they got accurate test results and relied on them.
I'm also of the mind that people shouldn't go to prison for non-violent crime (some extreme form of probation seems more effective to me), but that's an entirely different story.
How do you deal with people like Madoff and other Ponzi operators? They ruin the lives of multiple people.
Maybe she gets out after 5 years, which is hopefully enough for her to not start something similar again.
* One is a privileged charlatan who pretended to innovate, dicing with the health of innocent customers, and defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
* The other is an African American who arrived in the USA with $2K dollars in his pocket and became wealthy by innovating on the Web, kick-starting electric transportation WORLDWIDE and making America a space-pioneering superpower again.
I always hoped HN was a community of critical thinkers who orient towards innovation, science and truth.
How did we get so caught up in tribal political BS?
The media too - they hate Elon Musk more than they ever hated Epstein or Weinstein.
We can, at least, be better than the media, can't we?
She got off easy.
2 years for theft of Steve Job's wardrobe
1 year for that ridiculous baritone voice
I can’t picture someone with such an inflated sense of self-worth finding that to be acceptable. How’s she not making this worse for herself by trying to flee or something?
Perhaps you don't owe fraudster mothers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I’m not sure how advocating for another person to enter the US prison system demonstrates any sort of empathy.
"What went wrong? This is sad because Ms. Holmes is brilliant.”
Brilliant of what? Of dressing in black turtleneck and imitating Steve Jobs? Able to lower her voice one octave down?
This statement right here.
The fact that a supposedly impartial judge is having a crisis of reasoning...
The joke being "all equal before the law", the punchline being that aristocrat/peasant social structure is doing better than ever inside a self-proclaimed "republic"
Someday we will have to reckon with the fact that SV founder culture encourages this kind of behaviour.
I had to remind them she stole from and (more importantly) embarrassed extremely powerful and well connected people. This is the double-edged sword of the composition of the Theranos board and high profile investors.
It really makes the whole thing even more astonishing. Not only are you constantly lying, defrauding, etc but you're doing it to former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, four star generals, etc. These facts are why I think this is just pathological for her. I couldn't imagine screwing over people who have literally spent their lives implementing United States foreign policy and managing armed forces who by their intended purpose have killed a lot of people. I would live every day completely terrified. I mean this isn't a Putin opponent but still...
As one example George Schultz considers his involvement in Theranos to have completely destroyed his legacy. Ouch.
The justice system kind of "is what it is" but in this case there were a lot of people with a lot of weight to throw around to tip the scales.
Nobody seems to be talking much about the elephant in the room here BTW; which is that this is about a pretty young woman dealing with male investors in a culture where sexism, harassment, etc. are routinely covered up by disingenuous political correctness. It seems we just don't talk about this and pretend it wasn't a huge factor both with investors being taken for the fools they were, the media drooling all over this because having cute women on the front page is great for business, the public interest in Ms. Holmes (same), the near complete lack of that for her male co-conspirator, and a (male) judge taking the side of the cringe worthy crowd of crocodile shedding wealthy male "victims" demanding revenge for being taken advantage of by a pretty woman.
If she was male this company would not have raised this much and the related fraud would not be front page news. Nor would the sentence be this high because this is business as usual in SV.
It's a harsh sentence for two kids to have to grow up with mummy in prison.
The problem is, the medical field has stricter laws around it, and it's much easier to prove that someone is lying.
SV thrives on trust, not on deceipt. There’s a big difference between a founder saying “I’m going to change the world!”, which is optimism mixed with naïveté, versus a founder saying “my technology works!” when they know it does not.
If you're suggesting that SV culture encourages lying more than, Wall Street, Hollywood, Shenzhen, Bengaluru or any other place where large amounts of money moves to high risk ideas, then I disagree. It's at most the same, if not significantly less corrupt.
If you're suggesting that SV culture enourages lying to rich people more than other places, then I think you're misinformed about rich people.
You know who I want locked up?
- The guy who pushed someone into the tracks on the NYC subway
- The guy who poured sulfuric acid on a woman in NYC
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in SF
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in Oakland
- The guy who spit on a friend in San Francisco 2 weeks ago
- The guy who raped Chanel Miller
- The guy who raped another unnamed victim at Stanford recently
- The ones running around South Bay smashing small businesses, smashing cars, sometimes while people are in them
Unfortunately the government doesn't give a flying f about locking the people who are ACTUAL threats to the safety of me and my friends, and busy dealing with locking up some startup founders, who admittedly are disgusting, but not nearly as disgusting as the above.
Of course, she's being prosecuted for financial crimes and not this... I guess they got Al Capone on taxes.
We often feel we are in a XOR situation, but it's often easier for the govt to try to consistently enforce rules independently of the faces attached to the accused.
In the end she goes to jail for being a bad investment for investors and not for the "crime" of fucking around with peoples health.
Make rich people lose some money -- off to jail with ye!
Holmes showed her lack of intelligence by applying those startup patterns to a highly regulated industry. To get her product into some of those settings required committing fraud. So, the whole move fast and break things works great for startups, it fails miserably in healthcare. She didn't know better, and even worse didn't know when to apply a different pattern.
I think the cost to society for these types of financial crimes is minimal, and close to zero.
She wasted some specific investors money, which is bad. However, the financial crime has basically no impact on the average person.
#BuildInPublic #LiberateIdeas
I don’t think the dollar amounts matter much here, because those defrauded were rich and didn’t suffer significantly, AFAICT. (She wasn’t convicted of defrauding patients)
When all else is equal, we favor the earliest submitter of a story, but if one submission is more substantive than another (as yours was in this case), then it should win. A substantive article with more information has a better chance of forming a good thread.
On the other hand her CFO made 50m by the time he was 30. Now he is going to be penniless spending most of his rest of his life in jail.
You can have as many rules and guidelines as you like, but you can’t go around stamping on people’s right to free speech, just because you don’t like them, especially when their comments aren’t offensive.
Also, referring to other people’s comments as “cheap”, as if you somehow feel your opinion of others and the way they express themselves is somehow more authoritative than say, UN charter on Human Rights (the right to freedom of expression) gives me the impression you have little respect for others.
“We want the later, not the former”. Ever heard the expression “‘I want’, never gets”? You appear to suffer from what I refer to as a “deluded sense of entitlement”. You have no right to try to censor people, or bully them, just because that’s what “we want”.
I’ve been HN reader for quite a while. I enjoy the community, and the debate, it’s not a stinking cesspit like Reddit, but your comments are a step too far.
There is no "right to free speech on hn". This is a moderated forum with rules and guidelines.
>it’s not a stinking cesspit like Reddit
In no small part thanks to the guidelines and moderation.