One could play the devil's advocate and argue that the investors were culpable for not doing their homework, and that the engineers allowed themselves to get carried away and not pay attention to what they were actually participating in.
It's pretty acrobatic to shift the weight of the blame onto a justice system that is accurately holding a criminal accountable, from a psychopathic mother who could have used the cruel and unusual tactics of having a kid to avoid legal trouble.
Consequences.
She knew she might be going to prison when she made the decision to start a family.
Her appetite for risk apparently also involves her children.
She gambled and lost. For the second time.
What a despicable thing for a mother to risk depriving her children... they didn't have a say in the matter but she sure did.
The cynic in me wonders if she only had them to increase the odds of a more lenient sentence.
The part that sort of gets me here is that given that she wasn’t convicted of patient harm (questionable, but that’s the verdict), I don’t have any real interest in sending her to prison for defrauding investors.
The investors were wealthy morons who invested with 0 research on the technical feasibility of the company. They deserved what they got. Do some due diligence next time.
Hoodwink the entire public and nearly bring down the entire financial system, get a government bailout. Hoodwink a few rich investors, go to jail. Both at taxpayer expense.
Isn't there a less cynical explanation, that she wanted to have children and, facing the prospect of over a decade in prison, that this was her last opportunity to have them?
She could've had kids anytime, especially over the past 7 years. Looking at it now, it's hard to see it as anything but a manipulative attempt to delay the trial (and the strategy succeeded in buying her 3 months) and seek a more sympathetic sentence.
Getting pregnant at age 40 isn't easy, especially twice in less than two years. Highly likely both were IVF induced, the timing was just too perfect.
Yeah and she could have wanted to have kids at some point. Facing a period in prison that will take her past her fertile years, she had to make a decision.
Good point. There's always a lot of self-righteous judgment with these sort of things. Not trying to necessarily defend Ms. Holmes, but the objective reality is that no one knows her motivations.
That is one way to frame it, the other is that if she suspected that she was going to be going to prison for 10+ years she would be 48 on release and unlikely to be able to start a family. Dispite being a criminal, she is a human with human instincts and may have just wanted to actually have children?
That's not to say that having children just before going to prison for 10 years isn't cruel to those babies.
People are complex and often very flawed.
Edit:
To add, I have no sympathy for her, but the thought of being disconnected from my children for 10 years fills me with such fear that I imagine she has made her sentence even more torturous than it would have been.
Yes, this could make for a fine, touching, family movie. Girl, Disrupter. For a plot twist, Elizabeth breaks out of the joint, leaving her daughters with the guard. "Can you watch them just for a second?"
Seems like she could have made a few right turns down a longer path and been a game changer. Obviously much of the tech seemed...wanting. The ability to enlist such powerful people in such an important mission was power gone to waste. At least she didn't waste it driving clicks.
Have we forgotten about the fact that Theranos had to void two years of blood test results? People were eventually going to get hurt by this lie. There were real crimes committed here, with real consequences for the perpetrators. It sucks for her children that their mother was found guilty of her crimes, that's no ones fault but her own.
Fair enough... but to me the story of a bad actor getting their come-uppance isn't all that tragic, as there's justice at the end of the story. I suppose one could consider Elizabeth Holmes as a tragic character in her story. Tragic optimism leading to a web of lies and deceit?
because the prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests, and the testing agreements probably got the patients to agree if it didn't work they wouldn't rely on it.
prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests
I think it's more nuanced than that. Even if the prosecutors had mountains of evidence of harm to patients, defense attorneys have a lot of experience casting doubt on that kind of evidence making trail very tricky. My wife works in the medical/legal overlap and constantly sees stuff like "yes the patient spent 30 years working in an asbestos plant next to an industrial incinerator, but they smoked a cigarette once in the bathroom in high school so you can't say their cancer came from any one cause". And sometimes juries buy it.
But when you accumulate mountains of evidence that basically says "yeah, we know our stuff doesn't work...fake it till you make it, yo", you've got counterarguments like "we were just kidding" and "it's all fake" that isn't as resonate with the jury. So, the prosecution goes with the high-confidence charges.
Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. She got convicted for fraud because it was easy to prosecute, she got sentenced at least partially for cynically endangering peoples lives. There's clearly an argument that this is an abuse of the legal system, but she's not being singled out here.
People don't get convicted for doing bad things. They get convicted for breaking specific laws. In this case, the laws against defrauding investors were clearly broken, to the extent that a jury unanimously agreed they were broken. Whatever laws might have applied to the patients did not meet that bar.
I keep seeing a lot of "throw them in jail" posts here on HN and it's bad. It should be very hard for the state to jail someone. It should require extremely solid proof that they committed a crime which was defined in law. If we lose that principle, we revert from rule of law to rule of judges and mob rule. Some people like Holmes don't get punished in a way that satisfies everyone they hurt, and people like SBF might never get punished, and that's fine because lowering the burden of proof would only result in more injustice.
The fact that the law punishes defrauding investors, but not defrauding patients or employees, just shows that those laws are written by rich people, for rich people.
Federal time also, so she will serve most of it. They offer 54 days credit per year for good behavior, which is much smaller than what you often see for state vs federal sentences.
> Holmes in January was found guilty of four charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Wikipedia has this short lay description of wire fraud:
> In layman's terms, anyone trying to scam other people or groups through any form of communication (paradoxically, even wireless) e.g., phones, instant messaging, email, or through writing, signs, pictures or sounds can be punished with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the scam involves a financial institution, the maximum fine is raised to 1 million US dollars and prison sentence not more than 30 years, or both.
It's mainly a punishment and deterrent here. As a society I think we are better off trying to stop other people from doing a similar crime than trying to rehabilitate her.
"Little has been said about the innovation Elizabeth strived for"
What the hell is this quote? "Yeah, she defrauded people and lied to her customers, but guys, she really, really, really wanted it to work".
We might be talking about her striving if she had tried and failed. If she had tried and came close. But, no, that's not what happened. She claimed she did something she didn't, then took a lot of others' people money to build a business upon that lie.
So, no, we won't be talking about her "vision" or whatever.
At least one strange aspect of her biography that has always stood out to me is:
> During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.
That seems extremely suspicious and unlikely but I would love to learn more about it.
At the time, C++ compilers costing money was normal (Microsoft, Borland), and those were physical products (CD-ROMs, printed manuals), so it seems semi-plausible she could have acted as an intermediary with the help of her parents.
Yeah, was trying to find out more about that before, couldn't find anything. Now, the journalist wrote a followup about how he'd been mislead, and maybe that was part of the misinformation... but if it was it was a deeply weird thing to make up. Holmes is about the same age as me, and when I was in high school there were definitely free C++ compilers, even for Windows (I vaguely remember messing around with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJGPP, and Borland also had a shareware C++ compiler...)
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what happened to all of the Theranos hardware / technology after the company was shut down? e.g. the edison testing machines
I want to buy a Theranos Edison machine and am willing to pay. If you know anyone that has one, parts of one, or anything like that, my email is in my bio and I am very happy to talk to you.
I intend to take a small portion of it, melt it into steel ingots, and include it in 'Order of the Engineer' rings for myself and my colleagues who are also engineers.
We are looking for physical equipment in which engineers screwed up and the general public paid a high price for it, as a reminder to ourselves that our work is meaningful and is one of service to the people we serve with our efforts. If you know of any equipment that may fit that bill, I am looking to pay for that too.
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