Elizabeth Holmes to seek mental disease/insanity

[bdunham7]

I am surprised that the investors let this go on as long as they did, but they may have hoped that there would at least be some useful technology being created, which could be sold to reduce their losses.  This is best done by acquisition, rather than after a company is shuttered -- when you have a "fire sale" situation.  Honestly, if the investors were aware of the scam being perpetrated on the customers/victims then the investors themselves should also be prosecuted.)

Part of the ugly underbelly of the VC world is the art of polishing the turds so that they can be pawned off by various means--rigging mergers with other unsuspecting companies or having a company (that the VC has sway over) 'acquire' them.  I'm sure they let it go on as long as they did because they were looking for a less costly exit for themselves, and yes, if the board or main investors had knowledge of providing patients with faulty test results they should all go down.

[N0NB]

They all wanted to believe

I think that was really a large part of the story as well.  For quite some time the story resembled a 21st Century Hollywood script.

[DrG]

They all wanted to believe

I think that was really a large part of the story as well.  For quite some time the story resembled a 21st Century Hollywood script.

Yes, it certainly had (and has) some interesting aspects, but I don't know how much was simply a desire to believe.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/04/verdict-in-fraud-case-of-theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-has-lessons-for-investors.html

....Holmes raised $945 million from high-profile investors including the family of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family of Walmart fame.

Given the amounts raised and the net worth of some of these investors, I'm not even sure that they were in touch with the details at that level. I don't know this to be sure, but I think it is at least possible that others were handling their funds and they were simply trusted by the cash holders...until they were not.

[thm_w]

We see a similar issue with Nikola, who have defrauded investors to the tune of billions, with a truck rolling down a hill.  For some reason, no one actually ever investigated whether they had feasible hydrogen fuel cell technology, despite the likes of GM pouring money into the company?  It's really bloody weird.  I probably spent a day's research on buying a £300 phone, yet a $500 million investment is agreed on the basis of napkin maths and a body-in-white.

GM didn't pour any money into Nikola, not sure where you got that information from, they are not stupid.

Under the proposed agreement, GM would have provided battery and fuel-cell technology to Nikola and manufactured Nikola's planned Badger electric pickup.
In exchange, GM was to take an 11% stake in Nikola, as well as cash payments for its services. The deal would also have given GM a stronger foothold in the emerging zero-emissions vehicle market.

https://fortune.com/2020/11/30/nikola-gm-deal-collapses-devastating-news/

[fourfathom]

GM didn't pour any money into Nikola, not sure where you got that information from, they are not stupid.

I do think GM was stupid to even let their name be associated with Nikola.  I can just imagine GM's engineers saying "WTF did our marketing and lawyers just do???"

[coppice]

GM didn't pour any money into Nikola, not sure where you got that information from, they are not stupid.

I'm not sure about the first part of that statement, but the second part is definitely wrong. They didn't let their entire European operations, and much of their market n China, slip away from them through brilliance.

[tooki]

The expression is "Fake it until you make it".  She didn't make it.  It works for certain obstacles, like the financial and practical hurdles Tesla faced, but it doesn't work out when your underlying technology simply can't work, like U-Beam.  With Theranos, I'm not sure if the claimed technology can ever be made, but I suspect it can.

I very much doubt it can, because one of the major hurdles to the Theranos technology is that all blood isn’t the same. There’s a reason why different diagnostic tests require blood drawn from different body parts. (I had one full blood panel that required blood from 2 or 3 different locations.) Theranos’ entire idea is based on the false premise that capillary blood (what you get from a finger stick) can be used for all the tests, which it can’t. Even ignoring the dilution issue, if capillary blood doesn’t contain a representative amount of whatever compound you’re after, then it can’t be used for that test, period.

[SiliconWizard]

Yes, that's right. The composition of a single drop of capillary blood isn't going to be useful for analyzing much. It's been proven to be adequate for glucose level testing (and even that isn't going to be very accurate). But beyond that...