> it would be hard to resist scamming them
I don't think she even scammed them. She really believes she can do all the things. Her fraud was not a scam, it was just covering failures and fake it till you make it without discernment or introspection (doing it in a field where you really need to stop faking it sooner)
"fake it till you make it" generally means "your product is egregiously incomplete for X reason(s)" and in many cases, the investors know this and willing to take the risk. It's on the investors to do due diligence and assess whether or not the risk is up to their level of appetite.
I do believe that holmes was doing this for the much of her run with Theranos. That is normal startup behavior, and not really unethical, and certainly not illegal, though it can be spectacularly misguided, as we saw. At the point where she started hiding what she was doing, it became "fake it till you make it" that is ALSO fraud.
So no. For chrissakes, Don't generally send people who "fake it till they make it" to prison.
You can claim all you like that she thought she could do what she claimed that she was doing.
But that doesn't matter.
She knew for a fact that they were not doing what she was claiming, and she knowingly lied about that.
She is a fraudster. She is a criminal. That amount people bend over to support her - and other similar "founders" - is bizarre.
It does not matter if they thought what they was saying was possible, if they know for a fact that that is not what they are doing.
Im literally not disputing that she was a fraudster. And I'm not defending Holmes. All scams are frauds, not all frauds are scams. Being a scamster is a form of psychopathy that evinces a knowing willingness to hurt people in the name of self interest. Arguably my claim is scarier. Fraudsters like Holmes are scary because they don't think they are doing anything wrong. The fake it till you make it narrative even gives the perception of a long leash to commit pecadillos on the long road to success, in the context of the "make the world better" narrative of SV. There are more people out there like her, and it's harder to restrain them because they think they are doing something good and to boot they appear (maybe even are, if slightly) less psychopathic at a first glance.
In a word: scamming.
Even her voice is fake.