This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
It felt like the whole news cycle about the deaths was one where nobody critically examined the claim.
I am looking for real data, not claims. If you link articles without real and unambiguous data, it's not helping.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/07/elon-musk...
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
I understand feeling emotional about this, I really do. But the important bit is that if you make a big claim "millions of people died", you have to back that with actual evidence, not models.
I'm operating in good faith asking people to show data. There is no reliable data supporting the claim that millions of people died because usaid was canceled. That's all.
I think that this is an unrealistic ask, right now. Over the next 5-10 years enough time will have passed such that we can get more accurate numbers, but right now, all we have are estimates with wide confidence bounds (but narrower than they were last year).
I care about facts and data and I know how to read through propaganda. What DOGE did was terrible but I don't really see reliable evidence here for the scale and scope of what the media reported.
Simple question: how small does X have to be for you to not care?
Or do you genuinely believe that Musk’s antics caused zero excess deaths?
The problem here is that you are taking as fact something that a person with a vested interested in making Musk look bad has said. I'm just asking: where is the evidence supporting the claims for the deaths of this magnitude?
But even if he “only” killed 10 people (which we know for a fact based on reporting), that should be more than enough to make him persona non grata in polite society.
The actual numbers are more useful for the history books and eventual tribunals. Maybe that data can be gathered more definitively over time; I’m sure people are working on it as we speak.
I think much of people's response to this is driven by emotion, but that's the wrong approach to fighting the current administration and its enablers (organization, protest, daylighting actual problems, and understanding the psychology of the administration all go much further). Further, I think that posting bombastic, unrealistic claims about deaths is just misleading people who are already responding emotionally. Emotions will not get you anywhere in this environment.
This is not how changes to government policy are done. And yes, I’m livid and will eagerly vote anyone into office who will chase down this monster and force him (and his DOGE boys) to face justice. I am far from alone in this.
It's unlikely anybody can actively prevent the executive wing of the government in the short term, especially with a president who violates all norms and ignores legal decisions.
As a bit of an aside, I would like to know how the US got into the situation where we were being depended upon to provide millions of dollars in aid to prevent millions of deaths- the engineer in me says "there is a root cause that should be solved"
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
It cites this study, published in The Lancet (open access full text):
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Summary:
The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2021, and projects that DOGE's cuts to USAID will result in 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million deaths of children under 5, by 2030.
As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.
How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomised trial of this kind of intervention? Like, the Lancet definitely hop on far too many bandwagons for my taste, but it's almost certain that the withdrawal of USAID will cause ~millions of otherwise avoidable deaths.
And ultimately, it's the choice of the US government and people whether or not to fund these programmes. Personally, I think that they are worthwhile, but others may disagree.
But really, you're holding the evidence required here to a very high standard, one that many things you believe would probably not meet.
I don't think anybody proposed or considered running a randomized trial.
I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded. Otherwise it's just emotional manipulation- "fight the change by making up numbers that sound bad".
I mean, this is basically the evidence standard that we use for flu/respiratory illness deaths, along with lots of other hard to measure interventions.
Personally, even if there were no deaths due to USAID being removed, it would still have been a strategically bad thing for the US government to do, in terms of soft power.
Additionally, the US are noted in development circles for circular aid, in that they gave a lot, but then required it all to be spent on US goods, so it was more of a subsidy for domestic producers.
I do agree that lots of people just jump on these numbers uncritically, because of prior beliefs about Musk/Trump/DOGE, but it would be very very surprising if there weren't lots of avoidable deaths due to the cutting off of aid. Like, the same thing could have been accomplished in a much better way by tapering off the aid as programmes expired.
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Or is a sociopath, just not *clearly*.
Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company.
If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business.
The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike.
Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of these angles, they “just” had the right business plan at the right moment.
"Robots" that can talk/write like humans is probably an even longer endeavor we just managed to make believable enough to fool other humans.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
Relevant musical interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0