Theranos To Close Shop (cbsnews.com) 107
Major Blud writes: Multiple news outlets are reporting that Theranos, the company that promised to revolutionize healthcare with new blood-testing devices, is closing shop. The company "was unable to sell itself and is now looking to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash of about $5 million in the upcoming months," reports CBS News. The CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, and President/COO Ramesh Balwani recently settled a civil suit with the SEC, which charged them with massive fraud related to them seeking investment based on misleading information regarding the accuracy of their "Edison" diagnostic equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal, investors lost almost $1 billion in the company. At one point, it was valued at almost $10 billion.
Deeply sadenned... (Score:4, Funny)
I wish the investors lost the full $10B...
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That's what you get with a woman CEO. Lies, exaggerations, getting fat and not doing it after you commit, losing half your income...
Because male CEOs have, throughout history, NEVER, EVER done such a thing. As, for example, the late Kenneth Lay and the ex-con Jeffrey Skilling prove.
Elizabeth Holmes should be in prison (Score:5, Interesting)
She knew she didn't have a viable product, and willingly defrauded investors. Whenever someone on her team approached her with concerns about their approach or strategy, she sidelined or fired them. She was not a leader, she was a charlatan and a crook.
Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani have been indicted for conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors, conspiracy to commit wire fraud against doctors and patients, plus 9 additional counts of wire fraud. They are both facing serious prison time.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
She's already been criminally indicted (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.justice.gov/file/1072521/download [justice.gov]
What about people who got "tested"? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I sympathize with the investors, its the patients that I feel far more sorry for. You can work another day to make another dollar. You can't undo the type of harm that false blood tests can create.
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There were a lot of people whose blood work went through this scam and may have had all sorts of false negatives that caused them harm or death.
Mostly they were doing conventional blood tests, and then passing on the results as if they had done the test themselves. It is not clear if there were any actually falsified results, nor that there were any patients harmed.
By faking the tests this way, they were losing money on every test, and eventually couldn't hide the loses anymore, so the fraud was exposed. Charles Ponzi ran into the same problem.
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Charles Ponzi ran into the same problem.
Sarah Howe [wikipedia.org] had the same idea more than 40 years before Chuck Ponzi. Women innovators! Solidarity sister!
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She knew she didn't have a viable product, and willingly defrauded investors.
It isn't that simple. The basic idea of using modern tech to lower the price and speed of blood tests was a good one. Her initial intention was almost certainly benign. Then the schedules slipped, and the tech wasn't quite working right. So she fibbed a little to buy some time to fix the kinks ... but the kinks weren't so easy to fix ... so she fibbed a little more, and faked a little more. But more problems came up, the schedule was falling further and further behind, and it became clear that the tech j
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No official lying when you run a publicly traded company
Theranos was not a public company.
You don't cross that line, ever.
You are too ethically constrained for the C-suite. I hope you enjoy your life in a cubicle.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes should be in prison (Score:1)
Stop propagating that myth.... it's self fulfilling.
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Convert what I could to liquid assets and hop a plane for somewhere without an extradition treaty.
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Double down - obviously. Where she messed up was believing her own lies. She should have moving wealth into secret accounts and portable property stored beyond the reach of US law enforcement.
You plan on serving your time when you get caught and than enjoying easy street when you get out.
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She should have moving wealth into secret accounts and portable property
She was a billionaire on paper, but her "wealth" was almost entirely in Theranos stock. Theranos was a private company so the stock was restricted, and she had no way to liquidate.
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Theranos was a private company so the stock was restricted, and she had no way to liquidate.
Well one 'solution' would have been to take some big loans collateralizing them with her Theranos position; or give herself some loans from the company....
Either way she failed to stash the cash.
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Well one 'solution' would have been to take some big loans collateralizing them with her Theranos position
She was almost certainly restricted from doing that by her agreement with the VCs. That is a standard clause of nearly all VC investment contracts.
Also, a bank would not accept private illiquid securities as collateral.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes should be in prison (Score:2)
How good of an idea was it? "Make something cheaper and faster." Any idiot can come up with that. It looks like these people knew what they were doing was not possible and continued on with the Ponzi scheme anyhow.
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What would you do?
Steal everything not nailed down and flee to Cuba.
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She was not a leader, she was a charlatan and a crook.
Some would say those three are compatible, indeed, synergistic. Her only mistake was not making money.
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Worse yet, she was a he
Have you ever heard her speak? That's a man, baby.
She intentionally masculinized her voice when speaking publicly. There are a few videos on YouTube in which she forgets to keep up the act for a moment, and her natural, higher-pitched voice is momentarily audible. She is a fraud from beginning to end.
SEC charges are civil, not criminal? (Score:1)
No wonder nobody goes to jail for this crap.
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SEC charges are upgraded to Federal criminal charges at some point.
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Investors had very little knowledge of technology. (Score:5, Informative)
An example of someone who asked a few questions in 2013: Bill Maris: Here's why Google Ventures didn't invest in Theranos [businessinsider.com] (Oct. 20, 2015 article)
Quote:
"We looked at it a couple times, but there was so much hand-waving -- like, Look over here! -- that we couldn't figure it out," Maris tells Business Insider. "So, we just had someone from our life-science investment team go into Walgreens and take the test. And it wasn't that difficult for anyone to determine that things may not be what they seem here."
Re:Investors had very little knowledge of technolo (Score:5, Interesting)
The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology.
I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
One case in point (there are plenty of others I know of): a few years ago I watched a presentation of a cybersecurity company that had received a $40m investment from a VC firm. I happened to make a comment to a colleague after the presentation to the effect that the product was snake oil (which was the conclusion he had reached as well), and was immediately asked what I meant by someone who was listening... who was from the VC firm that had made the investment. A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day. So the VC firm saved themselves from throwing away more money, but I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.
VCs are apparently frequently foolish. (Score:2)
From reading about investing, I get the impression that kind of foolishness happens frequently.
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This is indeed a good question. I think it may have to do with a sense of urgency. That is (some) VC firms may think they have to make decisions fast or they might lose a good investment to someone else, so they don't d
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I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
They understand money.
The techies are (allegedly) doing cutting-edge tech, so it's not unreasonable for them to claim that only a handful of people, including them but not including the VCs, understand this hot new tech thing.
If a non-specialist DID understand it, so many specialists in the field would also understand it that, if it had suddenly become practical, it would be a many
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I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
I sure like to know how people able to get others to give them millions while I struggle to get purchase approvals for items in $100 to $1000 range. I have heard VCs will nitpick planning proposal documents to the T, but some simply write a check for $40M after a single presentation. I gotta be missing something or perhaps the worst creator of PPTs.
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I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.
I sure like to know how people able to get others to give them millions while I struggle to get purchase approvals for items in $100 to $1000 range. I have heard VCs will nitpick planning proposal documents to the T, but some simply write a check for $40M after a single presentation. I gotta be missing something or perhaps the worst creator of PPTs.
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It was basically clear to me when the media heralded her as the the superior female mind the world had obviously waiting for, when her actual education and work history showed that she was way lacking in experience and education to get a complicated real-world product done.
Now indicted on fraud charges. (Score:2)
Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, seemed only to try to get people to like her. She seemed more like a young girl than anyone who could operate a business.
People who have technical knowledge create cultural differences in themselves that are often easy to detect socially. Holmes gave no impression of having technical knowledge, or of even being the kind of person who likes technical knowledge.
Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Indicted on Fraud Charges [nytimes.com] (Jun
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Good point about the personality differences. They might not be visible, but talk to a person for a few minutes and you will know, at least when you are into technology and science yourself.
Re: Now indicted on fraud charges. (Score:2)
"He's fairly intelligent... Ah! He's full of shit!" -George Carlin
Re:Investors had very little knowledge of technolo (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend of mine has nearly three decades experience in this space and he said his company looked at investing in Theranos. Company policy absolutely disallowed writing big checks without seeing peer reviewed journal articles and/or data in lab notebooks. They were told: no way -- our data is awesome and too secret to show. So the conversation was over.
He found it very "interesting" to see which companies failed to follow reasonable and common best practices for the industry.
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The investors in Theranos were an example of people being extremely ignorant of technology. Someone who understood would ask a few questions and immediately determine something was wrong.
An example of someone who asked a few questions in 2013: Bill Maris: Here's why Google Ventures didn't invest in Theranos [businessinsider.com] (Oct. 20, 2015 article)
Quote:
"We looked at it a couple times, but there was so much hand-waving -- like, Look over here! -- that we couldn't figure it out," Maris tells Business Insider. "So, we just had someone from our life-science investment team go into Walgreens and take the test. And it wasn't that difficult for anyone to determine that things may not be what they seem here."
No kidding. The real question was why anybody let it get as far as it did.
The answer is not one anybody that wants to hear. She was a young, pretty woman. She was perfect for magazine covers, men turned off their brains, and ... yes, she was a woman CEO! And a "woman in tech"! How many more boxes could she possibly check?
She couldn't possibly have had the deck stacked any more for her. The only thing she lacked was a working product ...
Valuable insights. More ideas. (Score:2)
Here area more ideas:
1) Possibly Elizabeth Holmes didn't know what she said was not the truth. Why is that a reasonable theory? Because she obviously is the kind of person with no knowledge of technology and no interest in technology.
2) Apparently she was not actually the CEO, but merely pretending. From the Wikipedia article about Theranos management: [wikipedia.org]
"Holmes' then-boyfriend Sunny Balwani, a software engineer 18 years her senior whom Holmes had met during high school,
Re: Theranos did not survive the snap (Score:1)
Youâ(TM)re an idiot!
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Next step (Score:1, Funny)
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Ah, WTF?? Are there any dissatisfied Tesla customers? Oh... you've been short-selling... my condolences, you fucking moron.
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There very definitely is an astroturf campaign against Tesla and Elon Musk. Sure, there are genuine critics as well, but it can be pretty hard to differentiate them sometimes. The bad taste it leaves in your mouth lingers.
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https://youtu.be/YcXMhwF4EtQ?t... [youtu.be]
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That's an odd thing to say. Are you implying that Tesla cars do not actually provide their intended function? I see a lot of them on the road, and they've all been carrying people and moving rather quickly.
Or, are you saying their numbers are a charade and they don't really exist as a viable product?
Here's what I've found: [insideevs.com]
As far as U.S. Model S and Model X sales are concerned, Tesla has been able to keep numbers close to flat or even increasing, despite the impact of Model 3 production. The automaker shattered all previous records and also sold more EVs than all other automakers combined by a long shot! Additionally, Tesla’s delivery numbers alone (23,175) surpassed all monthly U.S. EV deliveries from all automakers ever, historically.
Based on our detailed estimates, Tesla delivered 17,800 Model 3 sedans in August and was still able to surpass last year’s Model S and X deliveries, at 2,625 and 2,750, respectively.
Or, maybe you meant this as an attack on Elon Musk's character, and that the imminent love child of Holmes & Musk will be the Antichrist.
The latter is a distinct possibility - I can'
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Re:Next step (Score:4, Informative)
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Tesla is also a fraud. But at least they aren't performing fake medical tests.
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Yup the Tesla equivalent would be finding out that the were secretly selling ICE cars, and plugging in the charger signalled the nearest Tesla employee to sneak up to the cars and refill a hidden gas tank. And that superchargers are simply gas pumps disguised as power.
So long and thanks for all the fish... (Score:2)
Why is Elizabeth Holmes not in prison? (Score:1)
She should be. A total fraud. Too rich to jail?
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She should be. A total fraud. Too rich to jail?
I believe it is customary to have something called "a trial" first.
No doubt the slashdot preference would be for a good old-fashioned 'trial by water' i.e. chucking her in a pond tied to a chair.
Black turtlenecks at half mast (Score:1)
She'll only go to jail... (Score:3)
if rich investors lost money. If it was your everyday peon investor, nothing will happen to her. Rich people only go to jail if they rip off other rich people.
Dyslexia strikes again... (Score:2)
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I didn't read that as "Thanos" but immediately associated this to the villain.
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Yeah, had me perplexed at first, because Thanos did nothing wrong" [newsweek.com].
Good for Them, Going Under Like That (Score:1)
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