Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 1001 posts

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#271

Post by [deleted] »

nemo44x wrote: post #177
paxys wrote: post #140

Guilty of taking a billion+ dollars from rich and influential people who couldn't bother to do the bare minimum due diligence into their investments due to greed and FOMO. Not guilty of endangering thousands of lives by running fraudulent and inaccurate tests under sub-par lab conditions. Our justice system is such a farce.

Our justice system works well. You are confusing your own emotional feelings for what you would have liked to see with the reality of what was able to be proven without reasonable doubt. The type of populist mob justice you allude* to is not just at all. *(Fixed grammar error specified below)

[deleted]

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#272

Post by niyazpk »

beebmam wrote: post #227

Sending fraudulent people to jail for a long, long time is fundamental to running a healthy society. One of the reasons the US is a decent place to live compared to other countries is because we actually prosecute frauds and criminals here. Let's start seeing some other countries around the world start doing this, like India, Russia, and China. My 80 year old mother was recently tricked into wiring money by Indian sc…

> Sending fraudulent people to jail for a long, long time is fundamental to running a healthy society

Really?! Interesting...

I agree, a functioning society needs good law and order, and some way to prosecute and bring criminals to justice.

But I am personally not convinced that sending someone "to jail for a long, long time" is the solution. How is that productive? I think we need to come up with better ways to serve justice than physically restricting otherwise smart or productive individuals to a room for decades on end. As soon as we are done with abolishing the death penalty, I would want us to start looking at abolishing this "decades long locking up" of folks. I don't have a good solution as I said, but I am convinced that this is not it.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#273

Post by kawera »

dehrmann wrote: post #223
paxys wrote: post #140

Guilty of taking a billion+ dollars from rich and influential people who couldn't bother to do the bare minimum due diligence into their investments due to greed and FOMO. Not guilty of endangering thousands of lives by running fraudulent and inaccurate tests under sub-par lab conditions. Our justice system is such a farce.

As another comment said, patients' tests were apparently run on regular machines, so the patients weren't harmed.

Collected blood samples were too small for accurate results using regular machines.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#274

Post by 2YwaZHXV »

sharkweek wrote: post #197
glenstein wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/2550149…

As someone who used to work there and has one of those water bottles and likely knows the person selling that one on ebay (based on the username) I find this hilarious...

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#275

Post by justinator »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #163
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…

They had a fully functional lab though, it just wasn't using Theranos' devices. This is what they did to Wallgreens, they sold them on the idea that they would have theranos machines in-store, but instead what they did was do IV blood draws (calling it a comparison check) .. and then would just process the samples the same way as everyone else using standard equipment. People were getting good results because Therano…

I believe they also reverse engineered a lot of the third party machines, in an attempt to make them work the way they wanted to. That's... that's bad.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#276

Post by neom »

kstrauser wrote: post #210
neom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed the case very closely, read the transcripts I could find daily etc. What Elizabeth did wasn't far from what many many many founders do. This was held to a legal standard, sure, but let's be real here... since when was the legal standard the SV standard? Is SV really the bastion of morality and legal ethics? Is that the new norm, good behaviour? Notably some investors refused to participate and iirc Draper…

> people are having success with her ideas today Citation needed. The whole concept has a critical flaw, as pointed out by her engineering staff and medical advisors: blood tests require a certain minimum volume of blood to work, and that's inescapable because blood components are discrete, not continuous. For example, a drop of blood is about .05mL, or about 1/20th of a milliliter. A common testing sample size in a…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/16/blood-s...

Maybe not quite as extravagant a claim as hers, hers was def a 100 year vision, but many people are working on and having progress in a very similar area. Heck even Tyler Shultz the kid who is on the road doing a press tour about how "he took down Theranos", is working on a Theranos-esq startup.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#277

Post by sokoloff »

nyjah wrote: post #253
sharkweek wrote: post #25

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…

That's funny. I was just talking a friend of mine the other day that is printing a bunch of swag gear for Nikola Motors. I would guess he doesn't know the history of Nikola Motors and I didn't say anything, but I was thinking, how much swag does a potential scam company need?

Perhaps trucks roll downhill better if the occupant is wearing branded swag?

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#278

Post by dylan604 »

Ansil849 wrote: post #170
sharkweek wrote: post #25

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…

> I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud That's a really cool collection! I always find it interesting to learn what obscure things folks collect. > any authentic Theranos gear How do you tell if it's authentic? If I was a collector in this area, my big concern would be that especially given that the market is hot, someone could just look…

>I always find it interesting to learn what obscure things folks collect.

A buddy of mine has a similar fascination with picking things up from defunct companies, specializing in film/video post production companies. One of the items he picked up was a standard banker's box. Inside were a pile of CD-Rs which turned out to be the entire digital back up of an unfinished 3D animated feature. The entire recordings of the actor's lines. The 3D objects, scenes, etc to an unknown level of completeness. Even though the work product was purchased from the bankruptcy auction, the copyright was still owned by the creators and could not be rendered/released just because they bought a box in auction for $20.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#279

Post by s1artibartfast »

drfuchs wrote: post #16
paulpauper wrote: post #9

A $100 million wire transfer. Is this literally how people invest in start-ups, just wiring huge sums of money to someone they do not know , on a promise/hope. that just seems so reckless on so many levels

Hey, minus the $16 wire-transfer fee. Fair is fair; that’s what I pay, too.

Legal firms for investment often take a 1-2% fee for contract work and running the deal. I wonder if the $16 came out of their cut

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#280

Post by dylan604 »

F_J_H wrote: post #150
sharkweek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Former Enron employee here - I have some swag I was given when I first started (lunch kit, values booklet, etc. Also have some golf shirts and baseball caps. Worth anything?

>values booklet

Very very very curious of the text contained within.

Post reply on HN