And importantly: after cheating the US governments' most trusted individuals-turned-investors plus a couple other billionaires out of several hundred million dollars.
I mean she just totally misunderstood the game: you cheat the poor in the US. Not the rich. Strange that such an intelligent woman missed that.
That's about the most generous way of possibly framing it. She apparently deceived investors, the media, and the public, potentially putting people's health at risk in the process. And this deception made her one of the richest people in the world, at least on paper. Like it or not, it's a pretty big story and it will be reported on.
She didn't get away with it. She eventually got caught.
But secretly sleeping with and living with one of her male investors likely was a factor in this debacle dragging on as long as it did and that's not typically an option for most slick conMEN even if they were willing to pursue it because most wealthy, powerful people are heterosexual males.
> If she'd done the same thing at a university she'd have gotten away with it scot free.
But she didn't though. She was rejected from academia, which is why she turned to private capital. Her fraud worked on private investors, not government funding agencies. She couldn't even convince her professor to get behind her idea, but private funds threw millions of dollars at her.
She had connected investors who felt defrauded. That increased the odds of her getting convicted. If they thought there was still a chance of getting value out the odds would probably lean the other way.
I wonder if she was knowingly committing fraud for the purpose of amassing wealth, or if she genuinely believed they would be able to deliver if they could keep the R&D going.
She's not quite a master manipulator, just a liar. Those who were duped were fools. The amount of money and contracts signed without due diligence are a function of some serious problems on the other side.
You don't understand. In our system of capitalism, fleecing investors under false pretenses is the gravest of sins. She must be punished accordingly, in order to make a legal statement to other potential capital thieves.
It's not like just some clueless investors suffered.
Rich people don't face consequences like that. They just tighten their purse strings. It hits the people they employ.
Plus all of that investment money would otherwise have gone to a real business and employed tens of thousands of real people for decades.
Her fraudulent enterprise robbed real opportunity from real people and real businesses.
Edit: Also, it's not just about eagerness to see her serve prison time. She committed serious crimes and has been given multiple opportunities to express remorse for what she has done. At each opportunity she has instead chosen to double down on her innocence. This is why we're all eager to see her serve the maximum length and quality of time.
I'll always be shocked that she was guilty of deceiving investors and not patients. Investors made a large financial bet while patients engaged in a routine medical procedure. To me it's obvious which group needs protection and which had a right to certain expectations.
She is highly intelligent but not street smart it seems - one does not win maths prizes for being stupid - just think she was either in over her head and was controlled by SBF and his cult to do rather dodgy stuff.
Did she get any special loans or other gifts from FTX like SBF's parents got a free condo in the Bahamas ???.
> 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.
And there we have the crux of why she was prosecuted...
You're much better off screwing average people, then it's just "capitalism".
Can't her investors sue her for mismanagement of assets? Or she just managed to take money off the table during the funding rounds, with investors approval as well.
It's really upsetting to read about this kind of story. It seems that once the money poured in she completely lost it and thought she was the new Cleopatra. Money corrupts...
>during which she run the company into the ground.
That might be an exaggeration, but yeah. It's hard to fathom that someone could sock away enough wealth to last generations for accomplishing so little (from an investor's perspective).
I mean she just totally misunderstood the game: you cheat the poor in the US. Not the rich. Strange that such an intelligent woman missed that.
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