Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi. He paid returns with other investor monies. Holmes ran a pure fraud. She put lives at risk with her tests. Potentially, peopled died. She deserves an extremely long and punitive jail sentence.
She sold fraudulent medical tests that were widely deployed and people made medical decisions based on those fraudulent tests. For instance in AZ alone this effected 175,940 consumers.
Statistically some of those consumers suffered worse outcomes and others died although the link between those outcomes and Theranos is hard to prove in the individual cases. If you throw bricks off of a skyscraper at the street below without looking you are trying to kill "people" even if you never saw any of your eventual victims. She is being punished for the financial aspect of the affair according to those standards but we shouldn't forget the other aspect.
If she was given one day for each person she defrauded of their health not their money she would be in prison for life which to my thinking is equitable. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. 11 years isn't even enough.
I remember reading an argument about Bernie Madoff: he'll spend the rest of his life in jail, but nobody can take away the 20 years when he was king of the world.
Holmes got half that. I wonder if they were worth it, or if she spent them dreading being found out.
Not that this is the right forum to re-try her case, but I'm actually shocked she got 11 years and I might even argue that is far more than she deserves if she was acquitted on the patient side. The problem appears that these statutes are based on dollar amounts of the fraud -- $140 million according to https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/elizabeth-holmes-senten.... Yes that's a lot of money but the investors themselves, how many of them were really damaged in any meaningful way? A few billionaires -- DeVos, Murdoch, Walton -- lost many millions, but what is that, 2 or 3% of their net worth? I'm sure there are some less-wealthy people on the investor list as well but I'm guessing nobody got their life savings wiped out. Defrauding the public, as opposed to some very wealthy investors, seems like a lot more serious crime.
It’s funny how much I want her to go to jail and be punished for her stupidity and fraud and hubris. It’s schadenfreude and not emotionally mature, but I feel this want unlike other few news stories.
I’ve worked in a bunch of startups and realize there is no justice for all the mistakes and poor behavior I did and witnessed so I feel like much of what bothered me over 30 years is finally getting some justice in Holmes going to jail.
I read the book and watched the mini series and her brazen bullshittery is so much. And that she’s been trying to dodge her sentence. And that she had two kids after being found guilty and tried to use that to reduce her sentence. And that she’s still super duper rich due to her fraud and has unearned luxury.
I don’t wish ill will on anyone, but if she gets shanked in prison I still feel like she made out pretty well for living a billionaire’s life for a decade too long.
Oh yeah, there’s also the media hype machine where they praise the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It’s like tech’s Bernie Madoff to me.
I think Holmes did actual damage that equals or surpasses some of these violent acts you enumerate. Medical tests that don't work is a serious crime. There are serious consequences to, say, an HIV test that doesn't work right. And she sold that with full knowledge that it didn't work.
Of course, she's being prosecuted for financial crimes and not this... I guess they got Al Capone on taxes.
Elizabth Holmes committed fraud, endangered lives, and harassed whistle blowers (one spent over $400,000 in legal fees fighting with Theranos). She only got 11 years and 3 months. I would not be surprised if Sam Bankman-Fried also got a fairly short sentence.
This is a pretty bold claim. Unwrapping the rhetoric, it sounds like you’re claiming that Holmes was given a harsher sentence because she’s a woman. However, the case is built on deliberate defrauding of investors to the tune of billions of dollars, if I understand it correctly. (I’ll admit to not paying close attention.) Do you have any examples of crimes of similar scope and how they were treated?
Holmes probably deserves all this, but we should recognize that the reason she's being punished and no other CEO is is because she was a bit of an outsider and she managed to con top members of the ruling class. Her investors were war criminals and other American elites. You don't con them out of their money and get away with it.
Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and she didn’t steal any money for personal gain. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years.
Based on what we know so far about Caroline’s misuse (abuse) of funds and possible mass market manipulation all of which has resulted in billions of dollars in investor losses. 10 years in this case seems light, no?
She was convicted on charges related to defrauding investors and acquitted on charges related to defrauding patients. A juror told the WSJ “the jury concluded that prosecutors didn’t present enough evidence to show that Ms. Holmes knowingly pitched a faulty product to induce patients to pay for tests.“[1] Take that for what you will. I think it was easier to prove the defrauding the investors part. We know Holmes gave investors certain documents. We know those documents were full of lies. The juror described that as a smoking gun, and I don’t think there was any evidence so clear-cut on the patient side.
If it matters how rich the investors she defrauded actually are, perhaps she should get just a few months in jail:
"Notably, Theranos’ investors weren’t the usual-suspect venture capital firms. Rather, her funding came from individuals like former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Walton family, among other wealthy elites. Some evidence showed that these investors were willing to give Theranos money even when Holmes evaded their more probing questions."
Eh disagree. Holmes got more than 10 years but she didn’t even try to profit by selling shares or borrowing against shares to buy a bunch of things. The scale of the financial fraud is enormous and on top of that they spent hundreds of millions of it on luxury items and influence peddling.
I agree, especially when you use the recent Shkreli case as a point of comparison. You have Shkreli who has been put away for 7 years for a hypothetical 10mil, yet Holmes commits "massive fraud", possibly losing 100's of millions of investors' money, and most likely gets away with a 600,000 fine and no jail time.
IMO the reason Holmes deserves to be locked up for a long time is not just because of the fraud she committed, but the way she tried to use her power and her powerful friends to destroy people whose only crime was telling the truth.
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
Holmes "blood tests" were giving people useless results. This is LITERALLY putting lives in danger. She probably is guilty of the deaths of some unknown people, we'll never know. Holmes is just as sociopathic and despiclable as SBF, if not worse.
Holmes got federal prison time. Neumann did not. Arguably, Holmes did worse. Holmes was about to start selling snake oil, or rather snake oil blood test, which is essentially a medical fraud, although this is not the type of fraud that brought her to she to the prison cell.
Neumann took stupid VC money for a ride. Unethical? Yes. But they giving it to him very willingly. His actions arguably could do more damage, because maybe WeWork bankruptcy can finish off SF commercial real estate market – I don't know how much of their 13 billion lease obligations are in the city. But it's hardly his fault that the system is so brittle.
Prioritizing staying out of prison over civil judgements you can extinguish in bankruptcy. Prudent strategy considering constrained resources.
Disclaimer, personal opinion: Holmes should receive life for her actions in contributing to knowingly providing inaccurate test results people relied on for medical decisions.
reply