In trial news, the planned session today was postponed after a juror reported a possible COVID exposure. It’s now scheduled to resume next Tuesday. Not a good start to things.
One of the problems with finger pricks is that the needle destroys cells as it is inserted. This is inevitable. In a standard blood draw, the damaged cell bits are negligible because of the relatively large volume. In the Theranos finger prick, the cell bits are concentrated by the small volume, and that contamination will result in errors.
You know what we need?
A portable machine that can test every juror in real time,. Maybe using a small drop of blood.
Someone should get on that.
“Today’s trial was postponed when 3 jurors tested positive for COVID, 4 for pregnancy, and 6 for lycanthropy.”
…and two of them were guys.
That, and all the issues mentioned above, and the non-trivial fact that a small sample is more likely to be randomly abnormal. That is, a larger blood draw will likely not have any unusual characteristics and can be presumed to be more or less average for a given human. A smaller blood draw is more likely to be randomly different in some way.
On the main topic: my personal opinion is, and has been for some time, that no matter what Elizabeth Holmes may have secretly wanted to believe in her heart of hearts there’s no possible way she could not have really known that this was fraud. There are several reasons for this, but basically all of them go back to the fact that was consciously manipulative She knew the technology didn’t work and that actual progress was basically non-existent; her response was not to invest heavily in technology but rather to invest heavily in deceiving people about the technology.
For instance, and this is not political because she was very clever about twisting people on both sides of the aisle, Joe Biden visited Theranos and went through their headquarters. He was shown all kinds of in-development labs - but it was entirely a false front, a Potemkin village of technology. And whenever anyone suggested there was a problem or that all might not be well, she responded with direct, vicious, personal attacks, and sometimes intimidation by her legal attack dogs. She avoided those who had actual domain knowledge and very specifically and knowingly kept the real picture from anyone else.
I don’t see how she couldn’t have known the true problems. If she didn’t, why would she have gone to such lengths to silence all challenge?
Agreed with everything gdave said above, and I’ll add just one more thing: Holmes insisted that all these super-duper-terrific near-magical testing capabilities be fit into one relatively small box. Many years, many lies and millions and millions of dollars later, it still hasn’t been done.
Given Theranos’s accounting methods, actually five of them were.
My take is that she did know the problems, but genuinely thought they would be eventually solved. She was just lying “for now.” Otherwise she’s have an exit plan.
Either that or she was overconfident that she could continue bullshitting everyone forever. So, even if she did figure out that it was never going to work, the idea of it crashing never occurred to her, or was too scary to think about, so she just didn’t.
Were Holmes’ lawyers successful in denying prosecutors the opportunity to bring up her opulent lifestyle while at Theranos? - in addition to her $200K to $390K annual salary, the use of a private jet, luxury hotel stays…?
Yep, she was IMO most definitely consciously deceiving and distracting to keep the investment coming and to silence critics.
Now, of course, she is facing the flip side of all that once made her a “darling” – the very casting of herself as charismatic visionary, carrying the company on her star power, means it is SHE who gets to take the public brunt of the reckoning. Notice we hardly hear what is up with any of who must have been a good number of accomplices and accessories. She may try to make the argument that she was a manipulated figurehead but good luck with now making herself look small.
…
(Meanwhile to no surprise of mine I am already hearing some in my circle who really really really wanted the “young female dropout disrupts industry” take to be real, turning around to making it about her bringing down all those powerful old men and those greedy venture capitalists…)
The Theranos scam had two levels.
On one level, as you say, I think she was taking the “fake it 'til you make it” philosophy to its logical extreme. I think that she genuinely thought that, as a certain former poster on these boards would have put it, it was all “just engineering”, and given enough time and resources, the geeks down in the lab would evetnually work out the details.
But she wasn’t just lying to the media and investors and business partners and her own employees about her magic box. Theranos was actually performing blood tests on real, live human beings, who were depending on those tests for actual diagnoses and guidance for actual treatment plans for life altering and life threatening conditions they actually had. And the tests Theranos was running were garbage.
At that point, it just doesn’t matter whether she honestly thought that eventually they’d be able to run those test correctly.
I don’t know enough of the fine details of the scam to know if she personally gave the orders to dilute blood and run invalid tests and report those results as if they were fully validated. So there may be an argument that she was “just” willfully blind to that part of the scam. But she certainly should have known that her company was directly endangering lives with fraudulent test results.
Sometimes “crank” ideas are simply legitimate ideas that, for one reason or another, are ahead of their time.
We don’t yet have the scale that Tesla envisioned, but wireless power transmission is a real thing.
“Wireless power transmission” is a real thing, but it’s either contact transmission, or a trickle feed over a range of a couple of meters. We don’t “yet” have the scale that Tesla envisioned, and we never will. I Am Not A Physicist, but it’s my understanding that Tesla’s ideas for wireless power transmission were, in fact, crankery. Here’s a pretty good explanation for why his ideas didn’t, and can’t, work.
Probably a combination of both.
In my experience, pathological liars don’t think far enough ahead to have an exit strategy. They simply keep lying in the moment. Long-term planning just isn’t in their wheelhouse. Self-aggrandizement is their goal.
It is perhaps little appreciated how much of the tech startup industry is almost completely vaporware and requires tech entrepreneurs—who often know very little about their proposed technologies other than enough jargon to sound smart to investors—to dissemble and exaggerate. Very few technology startups actually have any working hardware when they are doing any kind of initial pitch, and almost none of them have a viable business plan in any sense of the word beyond some kind of vague “vision” of introducing a revolutionary new paradigm into whatever industry they are entering into, to the point that essentially all of the books you’ll find on entering into the tech startup world advise against “wasting” time making a business plan. There is no “exit strategy” by design because this isn’t so much a long con game in which the suckers (investors) just accept the fact that most of their investments are completely worthless junk.
In my short time in the tech startup world pitching for venture capital, I found that almost nobody bothered thoroughly reading even the ten page summary of my proposal, much less the couple hundred pages of planning, projection, and technology analysis that followed it; instead, they just wanted to know what the market cap on the orbital support services industry would be and whether it could hit a billion dollars of revenue in five years. If I’d been a willing and capable bullshitter I’m sure I could have sold the idea that it would be a ten billion dollar industry in three years even though there is physically no way to realize that kind of market development even if all of the technology were ready for deployment today instead of just conceptual architecture and trade studies.
As for Elizabeth Holmes, there is no indication that she even thought deeply about the practical implementation of the proposed technology or really had the knowledge and intellect to make critical assessments of it. Like Harold Hill, she doesn’t need to know how to play instruments or read sheet music to be a band leader; she just needs to tell people how great the music will sound once they by the instruments and new uniforms. She proposed an idea that sounds really appealing (to anyone without knowledge of microfluidics and phlebotomy) and then assumed that all of the experts who told her why her basic concept was fundamentally flawed were wrong or jealous. Holmes was focused on the showmanship of selling regardless that what she was pitching was unworkable, and (I suspect) rationalized the deception and lies as just being part of keeping investors from getting scared off until all of the technology hurdles were “fixed” somehow by the boffins (who she and Balwani kept from talking to each other so as not to impede their “progress”). Her idolatry and imitation of Steve Jobs is indicative of this; she assumed that by looking and sounding like Jobs, she could magic the technology into working just as Jobs did with Apple, but not understanding that Apple products aren’t magic pixie dust farted out by basement wizards but existing technologies mostly licensed or acquired by Apple and stitched together in a stylish manner with obsessive quality control and intensively managed logistics chains.
In other words, Holmes was scamming herself as much as she was her investors, potential customers, and employees, because that is what a great confidence artist does; they project such an aura of confidence that they even convince themselves of the truth of their proposition even though they made it up from whole cloth, and then gaslight anyone who questions them so thoroughly that they are ridiculed by everybody else for doubting Truth. That her defense is now that someone else made her do it is just a continuation of exactly the same behavior that got her here, and I’ll lay odds that once she gets done serving the short (and perhaps suspended) sentence she gets for mail fraud for perpetuating a multi-billion dollar scam, she’ll go onto some new endeavor where she’ll find investors willing to be fleeced because that is what these people do.
“There’s one born every minute…and two to take him.” — P.T. Barnum
Stranger
In 2018 I wrote:
Finally, a link to someone who’s math and physics didn’t stop at undergraduate level!
For future reference: a solution to a simplified form of Maxwell’s equations is theoretically (though not practically) possible, under the twin assumptions that the speed of light is both infinitely fast and finitely slow.
(The author also observes that Tesla didn’t attach any importance to the math, and believed that his black box would work, once he worked out the details: the similarities and differences to Theranos are entertaining)
lolol. I can’t even accurately describe this, you’ll just have to read it. ( or at least read the summary image)
NPR really needs to hire Ron Howard for color commentary in the court proceedings. Maeby they could get an actor/analrapist* to create some buzz around the water cooler.
Stranger
* someone who is both an analyst and a therapist.
A real life sock.
Yes! !