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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#191
post #78

Time to kibitz on the likely sentence! You can get the federal sentencing guidelines here: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu... They're long and mostly not relevant except for the sections pertaining to Holmes conduct. Here's the indictment: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/page/file/1135066/download Holmes was found guilty of one 18 USC 1349 charge, and 3 18 USC 1343 charges; the 1343's s…

Based on a very quick reading, I think the most serious offense (the $100M one) would at least land in the 97-121 months bucket. If she serves half of that, best case for her is 4 years. Not too bad.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#192

This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we're a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious). Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a fe…

Do you have the epic ENRON intern Tshirt in your collection ?

My intern job back in 2005 was to take Enron's wind turbine division's technical handbooks and scan them on large flat bed scanners. They were all stored in Tehachapi desert, flooded and with water damage. I found a bunch of cool stuff in these boxes including a binder containing Enron's branding assets and standards manual.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#194
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know all of the details behind each count, but glad to see this result, which seems good and fair. Basically, looks like the majority of "committing fraud against investors" charges were guilty, but the "committing fraud against patients ", which always seemed like more of a stretch to me, were not guilty.

Can you expand? Investors are risk-heavy VCs who expect more than 50% of investments to fail Patients just saw a blood testing service promising the same accuracy as a blood draw and went for it

I am not a lawyer, this is just my rationale:

Holmes clearly lied to investors, and even if she may have "believed" in the long term prospects of her company, she also clearly intentionally lied to investors to get their money. The investors were also obviously harmed (they lost their money). Also, the fact that VCs expect a lot of their companies to fail is totally irrelevant. VCs (and more importantly, the law) also expect founders to tell the truth on simple statements of fact, e.g. "We recieved this much revenue" or "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests now". Again, Holmes didn't just exaggerate or say "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests in the future". She flat out lied about the current capabilities of her company.

With patients, most of the tests were done on standard equipment. I don't believe patients were ever told "we will test your blood on Edison", and more importantly, they probably wouldn't have cared that much - they just wanted their test results. So with the tests done on standard equipment, hard to argue there was much harm done there.

Now, some tests were done on Edison, and I know Walgreens invalidated a whole bunch of Theranos tests. But even then, it's harder to say Holmes intended to deceive in that case (a prerequisite for the fraud charge) - presumably they chose to run them on Edison and not the other equipment because they thought Edison could handle those tests. The fact that the lab was sloppy, the fact that Edison had issues, that in my mind wouldn't be enough to assert wire fraud on the part of Holmes. All in all it's just kind of hard to say that patients were really defrauded at all. If Theranos had instead just completely made up some of their test results, and Holmes directed that behavior, then yes, that would have been fraud against patients, but that's not what happened.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "authentic" mean here? Isn't company swag just the company emailing a logo to 3rd parties who print it on shirts/whatever?

I try my best to only procure swag that was actually distributed by the company at time of operation. As an example, you can buy "joke" Enron t-shirts, which I wouldn't be interested in, but some authentic team building event-specific shirt distributed to 50ish people? Oh baby, I'm all ears. I think that's part of the fun, hunting for the original stuff.

Would seriously love to hear about your most prized items in this shitco collection

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#196
post #10

It looks like Balwani's trial is scheduled for next year - is there any reason why they would have the two trials so far apart? Is this common in cases such as these?

They were initially meant to be tried together, but Holmes' legal team requested a separate trial because part of their strategy was to portray her as abused and controlled by Balwani and shift the blame on him. His trial is to start a few weeks from now.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#197

This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we're a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious). Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a fe…

>the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious). I was curious. My ebay search for "theranos" turned up 50 items. There were fleece jackets with high asking prices, so that certainly was something. But everything else I saw for mugs and hats and t-shirts was in the $20-50 range. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=theranos

Most of those were likely never truly distributed specifically to employees in the first place. Reprint or print on demand swag is generally obvious with the white background. Look for real photos, especially in people’s homes.

In my totally arbitrary set of rules the item must have been available or given to employees only.

Here’s one I’d love to get my hands on if not for the price: https://www.ebay.com/itm/255014966170?hash=item3b6013939a:g:...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#198
post #167
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand? Investors are risk-heavy VCs who expect more than 50% of investments to fail Patients just saw a blood testing service promising the same accuracy as a blood draw and went for it

I might be wrong but my understanding is that the patients' blood was tested on legit equipment so they did get valid results. It just wasn't using the Theranos technology. So investors (and Wallgreens) were defrauded because they were mislead but the patient experience was valid (since the results were correct and from proper equipment).

> I might be wrong

I think you are: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Theranos blood test work?

Short answer: "no." Longer answer: Theranos never really got their own custom machines working. Until those machines were working, they did use other machines and processes which did work. However, their entire shtick was trying to do a lot of tests on less blood than usual, so... they simply diluted the blood samples to get enough volume for those machines to function in the first place, and correspondingly, the res…

I think it goes further than that, the point is that scientifically the tests could never have worked.

Carreyrou originally got tipped off by pathologists saying that this was impossible, then they got sued into oblivion (see thepathologyblawg).

(IANAP but this is my understanding)

Some real tests rely on having a huge blood sample (e.g. 100ml), being filtered (e.g. by centrifuge) and then a test of a known sensitivity applied.

Theranos claimed that their tests were more sensitive so could work with smaller samples. Statistically this doesn't work because with a finger-prick test (e.g. 1ml) the sample is 100x less likely to contain the target cells - cells are integers.

Additionally finger-prick tests contain only capillary blood - they're filtered by the finger blood vessels only allowing tiny cells - some of the Theranos tests claimed they could detect markers that only exist in arterial and venous blood.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#200
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically 20 years per count, but realistically not too many. White collar crimes are anyways not punished very strictly, and she's a new mother on top of that. She'll negotiate a short term at some country club prison.

There are really no "country club prisons" in the US anymore. Yes, there are minimum security prison camps for first time, non violent offenders, which seems entirely appropriate, but a day spa it aint.

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