Unless they’re completely confident the scam will never be discovered (fantastically unlikely) or have a home and bank account all set up in a non-extraditing country for when the heat turns on, fraudsters don’t have exit strategies. They’re riding the wave until they get caught.
IMO @Jackmannii nailed it. Exit strategies are for potentially successful businesses, not cons.
As to @Ann_Hedonia’s many cogent points I’ll suggest in the very beginning lots of “entreprenuers” think their personal secret sauce is enthusiasm and drive, not product concept, much less product development. I worked with one such.
It didn’t matter to him what we made or whether it was possible or not. That boring shit was for the techies to figure out. All he needed to do was pour his personal magic enthusiasm on it and it would succeed, just like sunrise will happen tomorrow. Plus the infectious nature of that enthusiasm to attract seed money.
I don’t really think in the early days that Holmes cared whether she was making blood tests, spaceships, or websites. What mattered was that her sheer force of will would cause money to flow in and cause “her people” to invent what was needed to make the money keep flowing.
Pretty early on the product idea(s) crashed against the reality that biology and chemistry is much less tractable to sales personality than is, say, car sales or social media. At which she had a choice: fold the “business” before it became a con, or go for the big score. She chose door #2. Deliberately and with greed / malicious indifference aforethought.
All the rest is just playing as hard as you can as long as you can hoping to get big enough to become unprosecutable for the crime spree you’re busy performing. She almost succeeded in that. But not in building a blood test machine.
I don’t have a lot of knowledge about the case, but the fact that her father was a VP at Enron, really makes me doubt she ever had any honest belief about her “miracle” invention. And her mother was a congressional staffer.
I’m not sure how much that last fact matters, but probably more than I’d like to think about too much.
Yeah, I think a lot of us have met those types. My ex-wife got involved in a MLM which was just getting into the Japan market and was directly involved with the people who became the top black diamond distributors or whatever the top level was called. They would flat out lie to your face, but damn, they made a lot of money. They didn’t care that everyone else was losing, they only cared about themselves.
What is an MLM?
Multilevel Marketing.
Exactly. She didn’t think she had to know anything about blood testing technology; her plan was to Be A Visionary CEO™ and wear black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs and give cool speeches about her company, and all that would just magically cause the lab geeks toiling underneath her to figure out the tech and make it work.
As has been answered, it’s Multi Level Marketing.
I just remembered their top tier is a Hawaiian Blue Distributor and not black diamond. I had been reading the skiing thread and had flashbacks to my more reckless youth.
I dunno, I’m no expert, but I think if you’re planning a scam from the get-go, you’re planning on coming out the other side with your freedom and a bag of money, it’s people who get caught up in something that try to delay as long as possible and hope for the best. Like I say, I’m just guessing.
Holmes and Balwani both committed fraud and prison is where they should be.
Like you, I don’t believe Holmes set out to commit fraud from the start. I think she “broke bad” once the money started rolling in and it was apparent the technology was just a pipe dream.
On the other hand, I believe Balwani either knew, or didn’t care that they were committing fraud from the beginning. I also believe he somewhat controlled and perhaps even groomed Holmes to commit fraud, to some extent. This doesn’t absolve her legally from responsibility—she knew right from wrong and she wasn’t Balwani’s abused victim as far as I can see. She was a willing participant, even if she was groomed.
Legally, I believe both Holmes and Balwani committed fraud equally. However, I also think Balwani was the more morally and ethically corrupt of the two. Whether this should be factored into their sentencing as mitigating circumstances, I don’t know.
Right. Because that’s how Jobs made Apple so successful. Solving problems is for the little people.
I, too, am in the camp that this did not start out as a scam, even during the development phase. Oh, sure, a few rules got bent and maybe a little fib here and there, just to help manage investor expectations. Testing stuff in the lab poses no risks to anyone outside the company.
But once they started selling the machines and inking contracts and exposing real people to real risks, knowing the tech did not work as advertised, it became full fraud. Perhaps if they kept working on this in the lab a few more years something legit may have resulted, or not. But entering the market with a defective product supported by a web of lies crosses the line. Both got what they deserve.
I somehow suspect she may not be entirely contrite…
What, she couldn’t afford the fig leaf of booking a round trip?
Damn rookies. 
More like the same psychotic confidence that got her into trouble in the first place:
I am immune; consequences are for Little People.
What a moron. The absence of a return ticket may even cause admissibility problems in some countries, don’t know how picky Mexico is. So she reportedly pays $13,000 a month for the upkeep of her estate, but can’t afford a return airline ticket to create even the appearance of propriety. She now claims that she expected to be exonerated, and had booked the trip to Mexico to attend a friend’s wedding. One way. Maybe she expected to join the happy couple on their honeymoon.
What stopped her, I wonder?
From fleeing?
“Only after the government raised this unauthorized flight with defense counsel was the trip canceled.”
Apparently she was being monitored because, duh Elizabeth, you are a convicted felon in a major corporate scandal. Smart enough to get into Stanford, but less common sense than a drowned vole.
What an idjit. And what, no ticket for her pity-me baby?
I know, it’s just weird though. They had her passport, she’d already been convicted, what was her plan, bluff her way through customs and live happily ever after? I could almost buy it as some sort of misdirection for a larger plan, but no, I think she just panicked and then had a come to Jesus moment with somebody. I wonder if it was her lawyer or her sugar daddy, or what. Anyway, clearly not the sharpest needle in the lab.