Live data from Hacker News

Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

axios.com

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#601
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That proving some things in court is easier than other things and by reducing down nuanced legal systems to "rich bad" doesn't help the situation any.

IIRC the notorious gangster Al Capone was done on tax evasion, not on his main murder-heavy business.

I think Capone did not have any witnesses for his murder-heavy business. Here there were plenty.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#602
post #27

Some founders "fake it till you make it", and this news should serve as a cautionary tale.

"Fake it till you make it" originally meant behaving as an established company would, as opposed to presenting yourself as an upstart startup without a lot of customers. Basically: Professional website, formal company structure, normal business sales practices, having people available to answer the phones, and so on. You still had to do the work and deliver the results, but the goal was to overcome hesitancy to use s…

I thought "fake it till you make it" was more of an individual strategy, not a company strategy. If a company behaves like an established company would, they are not faking anything, they are behaving like an established company would. For the individual strategy it's more about combating impostor syndrome. At higher levels many people have this feeling that others have something they don't, so it's telling people to just accept that feeling and be the impostor, because, in fact, everyone is an impostor anyway.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: “This case was specifically about what Holmes told Theranos investors, although her lies also impacted partners and patients.“ If that’s true, it isn’t surprising she wasn’t found guilty for defrauding patients, and more cases (¿maybe one focusing on partners and one focusing on patients?) could follow. I don’t know whether something like that is in the pipeline. Edit: reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza…

Yes, negligence would be that something else. Theranos had a duty of care to the patients and they very blatantly breached that duty. Fraud deals with purely financial loss, while negligence deals with harm which is much wider in scope.

I am neither American nor a native English speaker, but I always thought fraud was mostly a deliberate action, and negligence was mostly resulting out of either lack of action or accidental consequences of an action.

So if a company deliberately and knowingly markets a "sepsis-test" that puts out completely random results and leads to people getting their limbs amputated (bear with me, I know the example is terrible), they can only be held responsible for "negligence" by those patients? Or would patients only be able to claim financial loss due to fraudulent loss of work ability and such?

There was similar reporting of those prenatal genetic tests a few days ago (they have led to unnecessary pregnancy abortions due to incorrect results), and I wonder what corrective action we can do to ensure these things don't happen?

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> defrauding patients about their test results Because und test results where in general correctish, they where just not gotten in exactly the way it was claimed, which was also not noticable less reliable or anything. And what the user bought was the test result. As far as I understood, with my very limited understanding of US law it seems hard to sue as a consumer as you where deceived but not hurt/damaged in any w…

Wasn't Theranos' claim that they could do tests from much less blood? So how could the results be accurate if they presumably didn't have enough samples?

During the purported early use of their technology, they were also taking full-size blood draws for "validation" against existing machines, i.e. the results were actually from off-the-shelf full-sample-size machines.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the notorious gangster Al Capone was done on tax evasion, not on his main murder-heavy business.

You can't intimidate a lack of tax payments for clearly possessed wealth. Unlike witnesses and accomplices.

I think the same approach is now used by German authorities against the (mostly Lebanese) "big family gangs" (Grossfamilien), that have also proven to be very capable of intimidating or killing witnesses, but cannot hide their acquired wealth.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#607
Collectors want some bits of Theranos goods, the croud of compatriots judging woman’s decission to have a child in tough times, the level of hateness is destroying all the metrics. I hope despite all this noice all investors that were sweating their money on politics lies, despite all brainless jodgmental underdogs she will get the minimum punishment.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#608

What's the takeaway from this other than "killing people by giving phony medical test results is just fine, but don't you dare anger the wealthy"?

Did she kill anybody? I wasn't aware that a hospital full of children died because Theranos was doing different lab tests than they said they were.

I really just can't find myself caring about some millionaires scamming some billionaires. VCs get robbed like this all the time. Especially the ones with more money than brains. And I'm also not going to lose any sleep if she gets 5 years instead of 100. This has been kind of a fun news story to follow the last few years but really I think most of the outrage here is because the particular demographic of this website doesn't really like women like this.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#609
post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, but I think the person you're replying to is less upset at the prosecutors/jury, and more upset about the laws in the first place. They protect the rich and powerful, and don't worry about the average person getting hurt.

In this case it seems to be a matter of distance, not power. Imagine that, rather than the CEO making shit up, the case was about a lowly lab technician who faked results out of laziness or recklessness. Even though his fraud ultimately impacted the patients, he would probably still get convicted for defrauding his boss or the company he directly worked for, not the patients he never met or knew.

There's a difference, lab tech would impact individuals, but he wouldn't make false claims to the general public as the company's main selling point. Here we have someone basically selling snake oil to people, and still she was found guilt only for hurting her investors.

Ultimately, does this mean that the next fraudster will get away with it as long as they keep their investors in the loop about the lies?

Post reply on HN