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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> but she just had to go all in to the fraud and wreck her life because she thought she could just power through on delusional belief alone.

... which is actually a completely reasonable assumption from her perspective.

People at her level of power being held accountable is the one-in-a-thousand exception. It almost never happens. In a very real sense, she was just extremely unlucky, and had undoubtedly witnessed countless others commit worse crimes without any negative consequences for them.

This is also the answer to questions like "How did those cops think they could get away with murdering a man in cold blood while being filmed by half a dozen cameras?" It's easy: Because they had seen others get away with it, time and time again. Statistically speaking, a cop murdering an innocent citizen has about as much to fear as a regular guy parking in the wrong spot. Indictments are not the rule, never mind convictions.

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I don't buy this at all. People at this level of power are held accountable if they make easily identified crimes where their individual culpability can be proven. Heck, even Holmes own criminal judgement shows that. I know the Internet's take on the situation was "She was only convicted for stealing from rich people, but not for defrauding normal patients, because the justice system only cares about rich people." That's BS. It's just simply that there was much more of a "smoking gun" that showed her directly lying to investors to get their money, while it's at least plausible she thought she could generate accurate results for patients since in many cases they were taking full blood draws anyway.

Besides, it's impossible that Holmes crimes wouldn't ever be discovered. I commented elsewhere, but the technology Theranos was selling was simply impossible - capillary blood at very small volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests. Holmes jumped off a cliff without a parachute and thought that if she gave enough glowing interviews to credulous news outlets that she could somehow keep from hitting the ground.

Do people in her position actually get away with it, or is that more of a not quite true narrative thing?

I worked a little investment firm in college. A few years ago I looked up my boss, the owner. Found out he was in prison! For stealing $10m from a bunch of retirees in a really careless, sloppy way.

I think a surprising amount of people try it. But every SEC indictment is not news so we don't hear about the people who go to prison.

>I think a surprising amount of people try it. But every SEC indictment is not news so we don't hear about the people who go to prison.

But you rarely hear about the ones that tried it and got away with it, because they got away with it.

But you don't know how often people get away with it, because they get away with it. Maybe people get away with it 99 times out of a hundred, in which case scamming might be rational to somebody with no morals. But maybe the odds of eventually getting caught are much higher than the popular narrative would have you believe. Then immoral people like Holmes, with a feeling of entitlement and belief in ineffectual enforcement, get lured into a trap lifestyle that will more likely than not ruin their lives.

I worked for a guy that ended up embezzling for the next company (a consortium) that he fronted , when he was caught (met by sheriffs at SFO) the European members of the consortium wanted blood, the US ones wanted to sweep it all under the carpet - he walked away - last time I checked he was a VC

Dude - who is this person so the world can avoid working with him.

Oh I really don't want to get sued .... his name was all over the SFChron's biz pages once ....

There was at least one war criminal on her board, while several other war criminals in the country are enjoying their retirement, so no, that's not just a narrative. People like her literally get away with murder, all the time.

The "money is power" is not just a nice phrase from books. Money is power over how much effort others will spend to solve the problems of those who pays the money. So it's literally power.

However there're also other ways to control others to solve problems involuntarily.

Exploitation is the area in which the civilization is exceptionally strong.

So yes, starting from some level of money and power it's pretty easy to get away with proportinally more and more with the money and power increase.

> it's pretty easy to get away with proportinally more and more with the money and power increase

The power/money creates a inbalance with the punishment ( it has less side effects to do it). Either by people being influenced of your status or the fine not being relational to your wealth.

Untill you overdo it, which may be the situation with the previous president.

Ask John Corzine!

If you read the account of Anna Delvey’s fraud, you get a sense of how close she came to getting away with it. https://www.thecut.com/article/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-y... I don’t know how common it is, but Holmes had the connections and experience to make something like that work I think.

Her father was an executive at Enron, so I’m sure she’s familiar with corporate accountability.

Enron wasn't just a one-in-a-thousand exception, it was a one-in-a-million exception. You have to go back to the early 20th century to find another case of the government coming down this hard on a large company, and it certainly hasn't happened again since.

The standard process for many decades now is that a company caught committing crimes pays a certain amount of money (nowhere near enough to threaten its existence in any way), and then can continue operating essentially as before.

Enron wasn’t a regular business caught committing crimes. The entire thing was fraud. There was no business left to operate.

Same as Theranos. It was fraud.

It is a massive mistake to conflate stuff regular companies do which may be illegal or distasteful, with companies that are entirely fraudulent.

Almost every Diesel vehicle Volkswagen produced for many years was fraud. The company designed those vehicles, with criminal intent, to deceive regulators (and customers!) into believing the product was something that it actually wasn't.

How is that different from what Theranos did? Theranos fraudulently claimed their blood test was capable of quantifying various factors. It wasn't. Volkswagen fraudulently claimed their cars were capable of meeting emissions standards. They weren't.

Yet Volkswagen is still allowed to operate, even though their business ran on fraud for a long time.

VW's cars existed and were drivable. In fact owners of their cars were probably pretty happy with the product they had purchased till the scandal emerged. Theranos' product never worked in any way that anyone, consumer or regulator would have deemed acceptable.

VW has other products than their diesel cars. Theranos had nothing but the non-functioning diagnostic.

> Enron wasn’t a regular business caught committing crimes. The entire thing was fraud. There was no business left to operate.

This isn't true. Read The Smartest Guys in the Room. Enron started out as a real company and slowly became increasingly fraudulent with time.

Well yes. But what I meant was that at the time it collapsed, it was all fraud. There was no real business profitable business to continue. Fraud was what it did by the end.

Worldcom happened within 6 months of Enron and it was at least as serious.

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