…and the door closes on what one hopes will be the last chapter of the Theranos saga.
Well, better prison than the next Steve Jobs. And by that I mean “dead because you believed fruit juice can cure cancer”.
Some are still living with lasting effects from their behavior. For them the saga doesn’t end.
withdrawn
@LSLGuy has understood me. (Finally! someone gets me! 
)
Which isn’t to say that there are no hanging judges in the US courts, but simply that it’s not fair to the set of all US judges to assume they all love handing out extremely lengthy sentences.
You could be on our Supreme Court! They unanimously held that life with no parole is unconstitutional under the Charter of Rights.
I don’t remember ever reading anything uniformly complimentary about Musk. But then, I guess I wasn’t reading glossy business magazines.
As for 100 years ago, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller got lots of bad press. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the malefactors of great wealth, although when the economy crashed, he had little choice but to ask Morgan — one of the few real economics experts back then — for help.
Andrew Carnegie got good press by giving away almost his whole fortune, but before that, when he was a union-buster, not so much.
It wasn’t so easy to know Theratos was a fake. They got FDA approval for a test in July 2015, which was a few months after the first questioning press reports. At first it seemed like the advantages of doing blood tests with lesser quantities of blood were exaggerated, but it was hard to believe that nothing significant had been invented.
Works for me.
Fraudsters have relatively high recidivism rates.
Holmes will not be scamming investors and putting patients’ lives at risk for the duration of her sentence, although if anyone can sell Theranos II from behind bars, she can.
Sometimes authorities are slow to catch on to such things.
I think Americans love a success story and it’s especially true when it involves an underdog. A lot of people were excited to get in on the ground floor of a new technology sure to revolutionize medicine, a lot of people were pleased as punch to see this led by a young woman in particular, and then others were mesmerized by her because she’s a charistmatic liar. I call Holmes an underdog not because she led a hard knock life, but because she was a woman and we generally associate saavy business leaders with men.
FYI, that interview with Elizabeth Holmes was controversial within the NYT newsroom, as described in this article from Vanity Fair. Interestingly, the NYT just hired John Carreyrou, who was the WSJ reporter who broke the story of the Theranos fraud.
So I’m overall disappointed the NYT published that fluff (despite the caveats and self-pushback from the author in the piece). But I am glad to hear there was pushback in the newsroom. Hopefully that plus the criticism it received well be a little self-correcting, even if the editor is publicly doubling down and says they don’t care about the criticism. Privately I suspect they (and the editorial staff as a whole) probably do at least a little bit.
I just turned off tracking on this thread because it’s no longer about Elizabeth Holmes, contrary to the title, which is what interested me.
Moderating:
I just moved a lot of discussion about plea bargaining, if it does more harm or more good, and the moral basis for it, to a new thread:
Going forward, please keep this thread about Elizabeth Holmes.
She says she can’t even pay $250/month toward the $452 million restitution that was declared. Hard times indeed!
Also, this delightful little nugget, in which the purveyor of snake oil is himself bitten:
They also owe $125 million in restitution to Rupert Murdoch, a Theranos investor.
They’re giving her more than 150,000 years to pay it off but now she wants to take even more time!? And she doesn’t have to start paying until 11 years from now when she gets out of jail.
I went to the bank today to wire money to my brother, as part of settling my mother’s estate. As i was reading the three page form i have to initial and sign, i get to a section about how it’s impossible to get the money back, and the bank can’t predict all the forms of fraud you might have encountered (and some red flags.) I mentioned it, and the banker said it’s become a common problem. They used to have maybe one case of fraud a month, now it’s multiple times each week.
He had a guy come in four times in the same day last week, wanting to wire money to get in on this hot investment opportunity. It’s a box that does blood tests.
The banker suggested he watch the movie before investing, and wouldn’t do the transaction. So ultimately, the guy wrote a personal check.
Make it out to ‘Ice Station Zebra Associates’. That’s my loan-out. It’s totally legit…it’s just done for tax purposes.
Stranger
Bumped.
I think today is the 6-year anniversary of Theranos going defunct. Shut down. Liquidated. Dissolved.
Elizabeth Holmes keeps fighting and appealing.
Article — Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ prison sentence keeps getting shorter; Her release date is now three months earlier after more than two years already fell off her sentence; By Melvin Backman; Updated May 7, 2024
➜ Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' prison sentence is getting shorter ⇦
As for Sunny Balwani, he was incarcerated April 20, 2023 at Terminal Island, in San Pedro CA. I chuckle because I was stationed there for a couple of years, yeah, over 40 years ago now. As per CBS news, “Balwani is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in San Jose on Dec. 7.”
Article ➜ Prosecutors ask judge to sentence former Theranos president to 15 years - CBS San Francisco ⇦
In related news, in Austin TX, Babson Diagnostics launched BetterWay blood testing this summer, calling itself “an alternative to the big needle.”
An Austin company is marketing finger-prick blood tests, years after Theranos’ failure; KUT 90.5 | By Olivia Aldridge; Published September 4, 2024 at 12:27 PM CDT
➜ https://www.kut.org/health/2024-09-04/an-austin-company-is-marketing-finger-prick-blood-tests-years-after-theranos-failure ⇦
Will Babson Diagnostics fulfill Holmes’s vision?
No. Per the linked article, they only offer a handful of relatively simple tests, and run them on conventional laboratory analyzers made by reputable biomedical manufacturers, not a magical black box that can diagnose hundreds of conditions from a single drop of blood.
Before an appointment, patients like Ross choose from an online menu of 11 common blood tests — measurements like cholesterol, kidney function and blood count. Within a day, they receive a text message with an explanation of their results.
BetterWay’s approach is different. It does use an on-site device that prepares samples for testing. But the actual tests happen back at the Babson Diagnostics lab using relatively traditional laboratory analyzers made by Siemens Healthineers and other manufacturers. However, Olson says the Babson lab has been built from the ground up with small blood samples in mind. Plus, for now, it sticks to the basics, offering only a panel of routine tests.
Linking this apparently legitimate company to Theranos is just clickbait journalism.
As for Holmes, she’s still trying to gaslight everybody she meets:
They added, “Substantial evidence showed that Holmes and Theranos’ scientists believed in good faith that Theranos had developed technology that could accurately run virtually any blood test.”
Holmes’ attorney Amy Saharia also argued in court today that Judge Edward Davila, who presided over Holmes’ original trial, unfairly allowed former Theranos scientist Kingshuk Das to give expert testimony before the jury about his opinions on Theranos’ technology.
She knew full well that they were using conventional machines to do blood panels in investor demos while claiming to have used their “proprietary technology”. What a lying, manipulative, destructive bitch who will never take responsibility for her own actions or what she did to damage the reputations of everyone who worked at Theranos.
Stranger
But it is a step in the ‘right’ direction. There’s no doubt that Holmes was a lying and manipulative bitch, but part of the challenges faced by Theranos was the size of the blood sample: only a tiny drop vs conventional vials with about 40-50 mls of it. And that was part of the Theranos appeal, from patients’ fears of a needle in their arm versus a tiny finger stick. So this is a good step from Babson Diagnostics.