Theranos Secretly Bought Outside Lab Gear, Ran Fake Tests: Court Filings

It is a fine line. From practical experience: there is a class of inventors who have genuinely convinced themselves that their broken tech will work if only they get the bugs worked out, and this is always just over the horizon. They probably see themselves as doing you a favor by lying to you because you will reap the benefits after all, once the pay-day arrives.

I've seen lots of misery because of this, both with the inventors themselves, their families and employees. In one case a suicide.

It's very sad and one of the downsides of being in the business I'm in because I have come to recognize the signs of this particular ailment fairly quickly and it is a huge balancing act in both convincing my client not to invest while at the same time not pulling the rug out from under a quite possibly already unstable person.

Fraud can be intentional, or it can be the consequence of someone genuinely believing their own misguided version of reality, usually powered by some form of 'wouldn't it be great if' and associated lines of thinking.

Even so, Theranos - to me at least - seems to have crossed over into outright fraud from very early on in their lifetime. There were significant questions about the tech early on and without a good answer to those the project should have never moved as far as it did without some serious caveats about what they believed to be possible and total transparency about what had actually been achieved.

For a nice example of how gullible people are check out the Ilium thread on the homepage right now, it's a great example of how wishful thinking can cause investors to part with their money:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167870

uBeam is another, so far they produce roughly two ecstatic press releases per year but there is no product in sight.

> A green card holder in Texas was just​ sentenced to eight years in prison for voting in a US election. Surely Holmes will go away much longer right?

That certainly sounds like a miscarriage of justice, but not really a sensible point of comparison. It's an entirely different domain of law. And even if it were apples to apples, a random green card holder vs an American tech billionaire will get vastly different treatments and outcomes in the American justice system (which is bad, but simply he reality).

> So will Holmes go to prison?

I would bet heavily against it. Holmes maintained panoptic control over all of Theranos's operations (until she was barred from operating labs, presumably), so it seems very unlikely that definitive evidence of fraud will surface from within.

Also, I imagine that the US regulatory bodies that started actions against Theranos in the past two years are or will soon be... significantly less disposed to vigorously pursuing criminal charges, especially of the kind that would assign personal culpability to corporate management.

Microsoft didn't lie about having DOS - that's a myth. They originally sent them to Digital Research and when they failed to work with them said they knew where they could get an OS and they'd take care of it. IBM relied on them as a bit of a liason to the microcomputer industry - which they didn't have a good understanding of.

> You have to know the truth will eventually come out? Right? Or, no?

You have to know, but psychopaths usually don't.

One could have asked the same of the VW engineers involved in Dieselgate or the GM engineers who worked on the ignition switch and simply changed the part without changing the part number.

There are those who want to be part of the team and there are those who can really play on that feeling. Then there are those who just want that buck.