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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

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Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#471

Post by wpietri »

lsc wrote: post #390
dreamcompiler wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Holmes (other than having read Carreyrou's book) but I've been around pathological, charismatic narcissists enough to be as fascinated as you at their ability to lie to the face of very accomplished people and be completely believed. It's almost like executives need a training course in spotting and dealing with them.

my outsiders view of management training is that they work so hard at cultivating confidence that they start thinking that confidence, not competence, is what they need to select for in roles outside of leadership. As far as I can tell, "leader types" are far more vulnerable to confident people than the rest of us because of this.

I also think falling for this is implicit in the notion of the MBA. Previously, management was mainly company founders, founder families, and people who had come up through the ranks. That is, all people who spent years learning the specifics of the business. But the theory of the MBA is there's some universal set of "business skills" that makes actually understanding the business domain irrelevant.

In practice, I think this means falling back on a limited sort of finance understanding and some generic notions of top-down business process. There's not much there, so they make up for it by leaning hard into their human instincts and skills.

Unfortunately, that leads to many problems, including over-trusting people who present well and seem confident.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#472

Post by astura »

occamrazor wrote: post #424
celticninja wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your father is a selfish individual. If he isn't licensed then he isn't insured. If he caused an accident, even without causing injury or death, he could still make someone else's life incredibly difficult.

Not sure in which country you live. Since the GP talks about the UK, It is good to remid that in the EU/EFTA victims of traffic accident are always entitled to compensation from a state fund, even if the driver or the vehicle is uninsured.

In the US many people purchase uninsured/underinsured motorist policies to protect themselves.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#473

Post by Kluny »

Fnoord wrote: post #399
Kluny wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. Psychopaths don't empathize, so they don't understand why social conventions exist, so they sometimes get it wrong and something seems "off". When someone seems "off" you don't trust them.

People with autism also sometimes seem "off" though.

Yeah, and that's a big part of why (high functioning)autism is such a serious disability in the first place. I'm really glad that society is starting to recognize and be aware of it so that autistic individuals can get a pass in this area.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#474

Post by mdorazio »

vanderZwan wrote: post #465
mdorazio wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately or unfortunately, "encouraged shady behavior" does not directly equate to "illegal". For example, if you encourage someone to steal a car tomorrow you're not doing anything illegal until they actually do it, they tell you they did it, and you fail to report it (accessory at that point). The actual crime part is on them. It's massively unethical and it feels like people should be in jail, but proving actua…

> Fortunately or unfortunately, "encouraged shady behavior" does not directly equate to "illegal". If an expert tells you to break the law and insists it's fine, and you don't really know how all of this works, I don't think we can still call that merely "encouraging shady behavior".

I'm pretty sure we can and do exactly that all the time. Case law established a very long time ago that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for illegal activity. The burden of crime is always on the person committing the crime, not the person inciting it, expert or not (there's a small exception here for entrapment, but that's completely separate from this situation).

I could be wrong here, so if you or anyone else with more legal background than I have can point to specific prosecutions related to this kind of situation I'd love to read more.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#475

Post by PeterisP »

jjoonathan wrote: post #431
Trundle wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I remember the big short doesn't though.

The Big Short made it sound like credit rating agencies engaged in intentional negligence, which doesn't strike me as something "too abstract to prosecute" (or whatever the excuse is supposed to be here).

Negligence in general isn't a crime - it does become a crime if gross negligence directly causes death or major injury, but as far as I know, you can't prosecute someone if their negligence merely costs someone some amount of money, no matter how much. It may cause liability for that amount of money, but that's not a crime that the government can prosecute and threaten with jail time, that's a civil case between them and whoever suffered and may sue them for some money.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#476

Post by olefoo »

fitchjo wrote: post #437
dawsmik wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in the industry. Literally, there were employees of 7-11 who stated their income as $100,000 or more in order to qualify for a home loan. This type of fraud was rampant and known by everyone.

Are you implying that the bankers should go to jail for the misrepresentations made by the applicant because they didn’t exercise an “appropriate” level of diligence?

The fraud itself is the crime, but the system set up to profit from it and the inducement to commit the crime are not part and parcel of the act itself?

Perhaps we need better prosecutors who can credibly charge crimes that have broad networks of profiteers eagerly pushing dupes into committing crimes that are precisely arranged so that the profiting entity has no liability for the narrowly construed criminal act other than having engineered a situation where it was incredibly possible and only indirectly soliciting the act itself...

We could have such prosecutors were the system not already hopelessly captive to the interests of the criminals.

But what can you do when law is lawless.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#477

Post by CyberDildonics »

tomxor wrote: post #436
astura wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? What is stopping someone who loses their license from just driving anyway? They've already shown not to give a shit, so they'll continue driving without a license. My dad lost his license many years ago and never stopped driving. He gets arrested once in a while, doesn't stop him.

> My dad lost his license many years ago and never stopped driving. He gets arrested once in a while, doesn't stop him. You live in a very strange country, in the UK your dad would have had his car taken away from him and crushed... and if he repeatedly found other cars to drive without a license he would probably end up in prison.

Really? They take your car and then crush it?

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#478

Post by DanBC »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #477
tomxor wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My dad lost his license many years ago and never stopped driving. He gets arrested once in a while, doesn't stop him. You live in a very strange country, in the UK your dad would have had his car taken away from him and crushed... and if he repeatedly found other cars to drive without a license he would probably end up in prison.

Really? They take your car and then crush it?

There's probably some youtube video of it. Here's an article from 2011 about uninsured vehicles: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8247837/Cars-to-be...

I don't know how many they actually crushed, but it was some.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#479

Post by PeterisP »

recharged93 wrote: post #307
SilverSlash wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Tyler Shultz? The main whistleblower and grandson of George Shultz. He was working at Theranos and realized they were a giant fraud. He lost his job, was harassed by lawyers, he and his parents almost had to sell their house to pay legal fees, his grandfather wouldn't speak to him anymore, etc.

Basically the gov't employee, son, and likely others we don't know about lost their jobs and even blacklisted. I say 90% of VC back companies are blowing smoke to the endpoint investor, public and consumer. 100% of those companies have miracle products that scale forever and work... In 1 specific ise case: the demo booth. They oversell. I see 2 out of 10 startups bring a viable product to the global 2000 table. Space…

Holmes was not following the same playbook, there's a big difference. What you say holds true for the early investors who may have been sold the future expectations, however, long after that Holmes recruited investors by stating that they have a "working Mars rocket" that's being used right now, when in fact it was smoke&mirrors using altered Siemens machines instead of the claimed Theranos technology.

The difference between saying "we expect to have X working within a year" and "we have had X for a year" is that if X doesn't work out, the second sentence is a crime of fraud. And Holmes was on the wrong end of this difference.

They're not prosecuting for the broken hopes of 2004-2006 investors (who were sold a future that didn't materialize, oh well), they're prosecuting for misleading the investors of, say, 2014 by lying about the achievements of their first 10 years.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#480

Post by celticninja »

occamrazor wrote: post #424
celticninja wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your father is a selfish individual. If he isn't licensed then he isn't insured. If he caused an accident, even without causing injury or death, he could still make someone else's life incredibly difficult.

Not sure in which country you live. Since the GP talks about the UK, It is good to remid that in the EU/EFTA victims of traffic accident are always entitled to compensation from a state fund, even if the driver or the vehicle is uninsured.

Yes but you know who pays that for fund? Everyone who pays for insurance.
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