Elizabeth Holmes found guilty • Hacker News Board

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#481

Post by x0x0 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #340

metadat wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully she'll get more, SV could use a good example. Otherwise it signals that wantrepeneurs can keep doing it with minimal repercussions.

Ok I'm not American so perhaps my perspective is different... More than 10 years would be utterly barbaric. The 65 years mentioned in another comment chain would be well beyond the pale. I'm no fan of Holmes, but what good does it serve to lock up non violent criminals for decades?

Beyond stealing piles of money from investors, lying to people about medical treatments. Folks were making serious medical decisions with the results from their faked / half-assed tests.

We should destroy her life for cavalierly playing around with other people's lives in that manner. Theranos intentionally destroyed the database of test results, but their clear goal was to yolo out medical tests.

See eg [1] or [2]

[1] https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-accou...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#482

Post by dave333 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: 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…

Skilling of Enron fame got 24 years and was released after 12. That seemed a far worse crime than Theranos IMHO.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#483

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:20 AM UTC

TeeMassive wrote: post #399

jonwachob91 wrote: post #40

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…

Weren't they secretly testing blood samples with actual working machines?

In some cases they were, in other cases they tried their machines. Even when they used the real machines, it's unclear if they had enough blood, skilled operators, time and maintenance to generate accurate results.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#484

Post by lbwtaylor » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:20 AM UTC

neom wrote: post #284

dopamean wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What Elizabeth did wasn't far from what many many many founders do I'm not sure this is true. She told a lot of egregious lies to investors while trying to get money from them. She repeated those lies in the press and to anyone who questioned it. And I don't mean a lie like lying that your product is more effective than it is. I mean she told prospective investors about huge contracts with the defense department th…

That's not what she said at all. At least not from the near daily coverage and transcripts I watched[1][2][3][4] She said it was being trialed by the military, in reality what had happened was Mattis said he would be able to introduce the technology to the military. This type of "abstraction" is in very many pitches I've read over the years. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/LawyerYouKnow [2] https://www.youtube.com/chan…

>She said it was being trialed by the military, in reality what had happened was Mattis said he would be able to introduce the technology to the military. This type of "abstraction"...

That's pretty far from a fair summary. Mattis made the introduction, Holmes could not get past the initial military diligence, and killed the project, and yet years later continued to represent that it was an important part of Theranos' business, to add an imprimatur of success and reliability of the testing.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#485

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

nerevarthelame wrote: post #441

Here's the earliest HN submission I could find on Theranos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 I don't really blame folks for not calling it out as a fraud at that point, given how little information we had. There were, for what it's worth, a number of people who complained about the ambiguity of the website. But many were convinced that the illustrious board must mean good results. Well done to medman77 wh…

Actually, interesting to me is that there are a lot of comments along the lines of "Well, I can't really figure out what they do from their website, but seems to be ..."

Which I think is really telling. I guess in my old age I certainly have taken on the "If it sounds like bullshit, it almost certainly is." If you're really confident and proud of what you're doing, you explain it in the simplest terms possible.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#486

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #389

jonwachob91 wrote: post #40

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…

Didn’t the FDA approve her tests… Yup - https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-gets-fda-approval-2...

They approved the Herpes test not all the other tests she was selling. And they approved it after they had been selling other tests for over a year.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#487

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:24 AM UTC

secondaryacct wrote: post #479

jonwachob91 wrote: post #40

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…

But then you must charge all the employees who did so, instead of her. Her crime is fraud because she told investor one thing and commanded employees another. But it's not the army, they could refuse, they all did the tests and gave the false results back to humans, which is unfathomable in healthcare. She s eventually responsible but her job was on investor relationship.

> But it's not the army, they could refuse

Officers are not only allowed to, but required to, refuse illegal orders in the Army. Enlisted troops are allowed the "just following orders" excuse, but not officers who should know better.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#488

Post by ck2 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:27 AM UTC

This was a theranos pricing sheet

https://i.imgur.com/ukWZMDn.png

If only it was reality and we might never have that pricing

Compare to labtestingapi.com which is the cheapest quest reseller, $20 vitamin D test vs $52

https://www.labtestingapi.com/product/questassured-25-hydrox...

$10 B12 vs $39, etc.

The biggest crime she committed was ending any chance at a startup with affordable pricing in the future, no-one would believe/invest so now we are back to a duopoly in the USA (quest vs labcorp)

Maybe in a decade, or two, we'll have our own mini-lab in a box in our homes for outselves and pets, maybe it will be on a subscription pay-per-month software model, maybe 100 years we'll have it on our phones like a tricorder.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#489

Post by cosmotron » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: 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…

You can also try out this tool I saw shared on another thread: https://www.sentencing.us/

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#490

Post by HWR_14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:30 AM UTC

andrei_says_ wrote: post #376

rossdavidh wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't really being charged with the stuff about patients, in part I think because the communication between Holmes and investors was direct, whereas Holmes was not personally communicating with the patients. Basically, the prosecutors went for the charges that were easier to prove. If Theranos still existed as a company, it would doubtless be getting buried under a blizzard of charges relating to how Theranos,…

What happened to the people working for Holmes/Theranos who were doing the legwork of systematically and knowingly defrauding patients?

It's fairly easy to set up situations where the people doing the actual work are not knowingly defrauding anyone. The salespeople are told the machine is real, the delivery people never see inside the lab, the testers inside the lab are trained by the few people really in on it (I don't think they had the proper independent training) so they don't know how bad the tests are, and the scientists think everyone knows they're working on version 2.0 but they're told not to discuss readiness, leading the salespeople to get the wrong idea. Heck, most frauds don't want their people to know that it's a fraud - too many people raises secrecy and conscience issues.