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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Holmes probably deserves all this, but we should recognize that the reason she's being punished and no other CEO is is because she was a bit of an outsider and she managed to con top members of the ruling class. Her investors were war criminals and other American elites. You don't con them out of their money and get away with it.

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Holmes' father was a VP at Enron and her mother was a congressional staffer[1]. She is the absolute definition of an American elite. To try to characterize her as an outsider is absurd.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200211105506/https://www.busin...

>Holmes' father was a VP at Enron

lol the family does have an interesting track record. What were they trying to do, produce the Kwisatz Haderach of fraud?

They need to cross her bloodline with someone from the Madoff dynasty and some offspring of Sam Bankman-Fried.

"Call me, Elon!"

[said grudgingly] objectively, she still is of outsider gender

Please don't dilute what she did because of who one member of her board was. She didn't just lie. She ran a con that affected people downstream who used the service. Who knows what kind of damage she caused with her fake tests. She belongs in jail and all of her money has been made through fraud. That's on her.

That is not too different to what the food industry is doing. Soon there will be 100 million people with diabetes.

Yes. It is actually too different to what the food industry is doing.

Shouldn’t Walgreens execs be on trial for not having done proper due diligence before rolling out the tech?

Well, no. Half the US secretaries of State both invested in Theranos and helped the company. Such a thing would lead to asking the same questions about them.

The difference is Walgreens took the tech and held it out to the public, implicitly stating that they had done appropriate due diligence and the outcome was that they were backing it.

Being a Secretary of State or other politician and investing and sitting on the board only means that they thought it presented a reasonable investment opportunity and that they believed they could execute board governance requirements. I don’t think anyone believes Henry Kissinger could do due diligence on technology.

I think what people believe about Henry Kissinger and all other Secretaries of State is that they could and would hire people who would, correctly, do due diligence for them, and wouldn't be fooled as a result.

You would expect them to have both a lot of experience doing this, and being able to sniff out problems. I mean, that is what they've done their entire life, isn't it? You'd expect them to be half-decent at it.

Instead it very much looks like they backed this startup because of family and government ties, and one wonders if you'd look, would you find they backed it against advice by reasonable and knowledgeable people? You know "Trump stuff".

Worst part of this is, when it comes to testing many biomarkers simultaneously in a single small sample, there's a metric boatload of startups with credible stories (and testing 1 biomarker in a small sample is a difficult but solved problem. Any hospital can do that now). These startup aren't seeing investment ... and weren't seeing investment before Theranos either, but a lot of them aren't outright scams! They're trying to make it work, and slowly, very slowly advancing the state of the art.

These startups have to scrape together funds that come from testing crime scenes (if you can test very small samples, you can test blood found at a crime scene because only the top layer coagulates, there's a "liquid core" of a few cl inside ...)

She sold a product that directly caused people to miss their diagnosis that probably resulted in many deaths. She showed absolutely no remorse for this. I think she got off lightly.

I think the unaccountability of the high criminality of US elites is so entrenched that people read my comment and think I'm arguing that because no one else goes to prison Holmes should get off. On the contrary, we should be calling for more prison for more elites but also not be naïve as to why Holmes is going down in this instance.

The reason she is being punished is because she committed very flagrant fraud. Fraud that likely lead to deaths as people trusted theranos’s fake blood test results.

Also, her cofounder got a little more prison time than she did.

Not everything has to be part of some grand conspiracy.

Well, yes. But I'd say that the direct harm caused by her particular brand of fraud, combined with how utterly ham-fisted it was, also plays a part.

Of course, but we see insane crimes all the time and nobody goes to jail. Poisoning water for entire cities like in Flint (which was a government/private sector collab), financial crimes that put millions in poverty, etc.

It's not always possible to prove criminal negligence or malice from incompetence.

There are a lot of well intentioned people doing things that directly or indirectly harm people. We generally grade people on intentions and not results.

Other countries have different strategies and those also come with trade offs.

In some ways she did though, she'll likely never pay that $452 million in restitution and sure, she's in jail, but if she doesn't pay it back.. she got away with it.

I don't think it counts as getting away with it if you don't get to keep the money and you are stuck in prison.

just hire the same image consultant who guided Martha Stewart from jailbird pariah to amusing D-list celebrity

She reaped the benefits from the money a for a good period of time. Not having the full sum of cash can't discredit the lifestyle and things she did during that time frame.

But then doesn't basically everyone who does anything 'get away with it'?

E.g. I kill my wife. I get executed 6 months later but I get to enjoy my wife being dead for 6 months.

This is the "time horizon" problem. There's more theory about this than you ever care to know in books about reinforcement learning.

A longer time horizon is better, but you'll need to learn that at a shorter horizon of course.

Her investors were war criminals

Specifically?

He's referring to Kissinger, obviously.

Yep, also Mattis and Shultz

Who is responsible for deployment of incendiary weapons, including white phosphorus against civilians.

(Obviously, EH is a criminal and a fraud, even if she's defrauding other criminals.)

Agreed. I'm not saying she isn't merely that we should think about why is this happening to her and not others with the implication that many more elites should be in prison not that she should get off.

Agreed on Kissinger and Mattis.

I need more substantiation in regard to Shultz (beyond his delusional policy supports, here and there).

Henry Kissinger

https://news.crunchbase.com/health-wellness-biotech/theranos...

Board of directors

    Henry Kissinger (former United States Secretary of State);
    Jim Mattis (retired Marine Corps four-star general);
    George Shultz (former United States Secretary of State);
    Richard Kovacevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo);
    William Perry (former United States Secretary of Defense); and
    William Foege (former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

Investors

    Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who led a $5.8 million Series A in February 2005;
    Venture capitalist and Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Tim Draper, who remained an outspoken defender of Theranos at least until 2018;
    Oracle Executive Chairman and founder Larry Ellison; and
    National pharmacy and retail chain Walgreens.

damn, i kind of like her now...

How do these Secretary’s of State and Generals end up on boards like this?

Like how do they find the company in the first place? Who connects SecDef Mattis with a blood test company?

what value do they gain out of being on it measurably? Equity? Salary?

and once there what do they really do?

Does Henry Kissinger really have a connection to the modern day FDA to move things along for Theranos?

> How do these Secretary’s of State and Generals end up on boards like this?

They get jobs on these boards, because the owners of the company want them on the board, because they have friends who can grease the wheels in getting the DOD to buy services from this startup.

It's just plain-old corruption. As long as it's not formally quid-pro-quo, it's not illegal.

> Does Henry Kissinger really have a connection to the modern day FDA to move things along for Theranos?

He probably can't move the FDA, their process is too streamlined and public, and they may be under too much of a microscope, but he almost certainly has friends who can move some less-public/streamlined/visible processes - procurement.

It's just plain-old corruption

Yup - as with Dropbox's tapping of Condoleeza Rice.

Lest we forget: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/

'On April 21, 2018, Draper predicted during an Intelligence Squared debate that "In five years you are going to try to go buy coffee with fiat currency and they are going to laugh at you because you're not using crypto."'

Nice! No, Tim, I'm laughing at you. There are so many crazy VC's.

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