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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

If Elizabeth Holmes had been able to pull off some successful product that made a lot of money, no doubt all the "fake it 'til you make it" she did at the beginning (showing demos that didn't work, sending tests to outside labs and saying they were run on their equipment) would have been forgiven no doubt.

Just another nostalgic Silicon Valley "hustler" story.

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She really only got into trouble because her lies became obvious and she risked people's lives. If it was some CRUD app and she didn't get enough customers or whatever, more than likely she'd have gotten money for another company.

> she risked people's lives

She was found not guilty of that bit. The conviction and jail time is only for defrauding the investors.

Only that Theranos product was techically impossible. Which makes the whole thing even crazier, nobody did even the slightest due dilligence there. Seems to be par of th cours so, other exhibits are FTX and WeWork.

The core FTX crypto exchange business was very profitable. But Alameda wasn't. Also everyone at FTX was committing fraud.

Based on what financial statements do we know FTX was profitable? Also, the stole customer funds.

> Based on what financial statements do we know FTX was profitable?

The crypto-exchange part I have read many times it was profitable. Running an exchange is a profitable endeavour as you just take a cut of all transactions. As long as you control your costs it is a money printer.

The rest of FTX was full of fraud and Alameda was a money sink via unprofitable speculation. Also likely helping laundry money as well via poor KYC.

Running an exchange is a great business though if you have the volume, doesn't matter if it is crypto or futures or stocks.

No, crypto exchanges are only profitable as a result of massive wash trading and scamming. If they had to actually compete the margins would be hilariously low. Probably even lower than a typical bank because the product is just worse.

Theranos wasn't a Silicon Valley company - nobody in SV invested in it except Draper (who's a nutcase) because they all thought it was a scam.

It was an affinity fraud on non-SV rich people founded on acting like a tech company.

> If Elizabeth Holmes had been able to pull off some successful product

Like Loopt?

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