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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

#481

Post by ggg9990 »

mdorazio wrote: post #474
vanderZwan wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

“Inciting” is exactly the name given to the crime of inducing someone else to commit a crime.

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

#482

Post by telchar »

csomar wrote: post #462
dnautics wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also iirc the shkreli case is strange since no one actually suffered any damages.

According to him (in an interview) he only jacked the prices up for insurance companies.

Which makes every single person with insurance a (diffuse) victim. Let's not pretend that exorbitant pricing doesn't have any relation to the high cost of medical insurance/care, which in turn of course indirectly kills people.

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

#483

Post by telchar »

paulddraper wrote: post #257
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

> the US can’t retrospectively prosecute bankers AFAIK there were poor decisions and bad investments but not straight up fraud. Nobody needed to be jailed; there were a few that needed to be allowed to fail.

You're forgetting robo-signing foreclosure affidavits in the wake of the financial crisis. That's potentially hundreds of thousands of counts of fraud. The banks were only forced to settle, and were not prosecuted. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure...

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

#484

Post by maxxxxx »

austenallred wrote: post #441
recharged93 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The difference is that SpaceX realizes the goal is aspirational, and isn’t signing people up for doomed rides to Mars right now.

Exactly. If SpaceX started taking deposits for a Mars ride within the next two years there would be a problem.

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

#485

Post by seanhunter »

maxxxxx wrote: post #131
jjoonathan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion: Holmes heard about microfluidics at school, misjudged its position in the hype cycle (it's a red ocean, not a blue ocean), sold herself as an expert, raised money from people who didn't know better, and let the success get to her head because at some point she would have hired actual experts and they would probably have tried to steer her away from the known-hard problem she was trying to tackle and tow…

This sound like she started with good intentions but when it was clear she was failing she didn't quit but started lying until the lies got bigger and bigger. Sounds a little like Madoff.

In point of fact, that's not what happened in Madoff. There never were any investments made by Madoff's fund - his wealth management business was a fraud from the 1980s onwards.

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

#486

Post by microtherion »

kwindla wrote: post #231
weiming wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming they had some of the best people in the field working on these. Makes me wonder how much the employees were aware of the company's situation, and the infeasibility of some of these goals.

Very aware, but information was strictly compartmentalized inside the company so individual employees had to figure out that things were badly wrong in different ways, depending on what their roles were and when in the lifecycle of the company they were there. Overall, though, the employee turnover was insane. As someone who has spent a lot of time around startups, the amount of employee turnover was one of the crazi…

What I found most appalling about the behavior described in the book, and maybe among the most probative in the criminal case, is the heavy handed use of legal threats to stop employees from talking and negative reporting.

I'm willing to forgive quite a bit of "fake it till you make it" flim-flam, but anybody who uses such strong-arm tactics deserves having the book thrown at them.

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

#487

Post by smallgovt »

mikeryan wrote: post #187
tdurden wrote: post #182

Martin Shkreli is in prison now - he deserves it, though he was guilty of _far_ less then Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes should already be in prison for massive fraud. The fact she is a female and mimicked Jobs seems to have saved her so far though.

That’s an interesting read on what Shkreli did vs Holmes. At least Holmes “victims” AFAIK were mostly rich folks losing other people’s money they’re gambling with and should have known better. Shkreli fleeced normal folks just looking to get their day meds.

Do some research into the actual facts around Shkreli and you'll find that he didn't fleece 'normal folks'. His profits came directly from large insurance firms.

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

#488

Post by NinaJZapala »

mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

This is profoundly interesting and so disgusting that companies are eager to do the wrong thing and even plan for it by having contingency budgets to pay the fines. Think what we as a collective could do with all of that money; feed the poor, water for everyone, clean the oceans, stopping child sex trafficking...Ok, I'm becoming angry thinking of all this gotta run!

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

#489

Post by grogenaut »

yourapostasy wrote: post #232
icelancer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked. This confuses a lot of people (not saying you are one of them), but this is really common in intelligent non-experts. People vastly overestimate how intelligent they are when they place value on their intelligence; in other words, they like thinking they are smart. When t…

> ...they have false confidence about areas they have zero expertise in, purely because they feel they can figure it out. The antidote to this effect: pick any object around you, and set out to make it yourself from scratch. Or just set out to make the precursors. An object as prosaic as say, a window. A lot of people who suffer from this effect dismissively wave away such a challenge, saying in more words that it's…

What if I say making a window is a giant pain in the ass and I'm not set up for handling molten glass in that scale. I might could pull off a bottle or glass with the right equipment and a few hundred hours of training and practice. Is that reasonable? And yes I'd be buying tools and raw glass, not sourcing sand and blowing my own fire brick or making my own kanthal wire from scratch.

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

#490

Post by jjoonathan »

PeterisP wrote: post #475
jjoonathan wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I misused the term. How about "fraud," then?
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