January 3, 2022

"If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale."

"And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals. The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos’s technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos’s problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients. Ms. Holmes was acquitted on four counts related to patients who took Theranos’s blood tests and one related to advertisements that the patients saw."

42 comments:

gilbar said...

when she gets to prison, will she Still use the fake low voice?
or, will she start using a new (fake) high squeaky voice?

Drago said...

General Mattis should be in the crosshairs as well given his completely corrupted decision-making while on active duty when he was driving use of Theranos products in the military.

But Mattis made sure to work with the deep staters on keeping the Forever Wars alive so he is safe within the untouchable establishment bubble.

Moondawggie said...

It's refreshing to see that when a CEO plays the victim card nowadays, it doesn't work.

Lewis Wetzel said...

" . . . after lying to an investigator about a stock sale."
Never talk to LE without your lawyer present. You and the cops aren't on the same team. They are your adversaries. They are there to gather evidence and they are professional witnesses.
You are not.

Big Mike said...

I hope she winds up sharing a cell with a serial rapist who identifies as female.

Howard said...

Just like Gizlady Maxwell, Elizabeth Wendell Holmes is sent to jail for crimes men have committed for centuries and got away with it because of the Good Old Boys Club. Not only was she under the spell of a swarthy svengali, the old men who funded the scam just encouraged the impressionable young lady forcing her to believe her own untruths.

A true feminist icon and champion of industry cannot be allowed to succeed. By all accounts, she was on the verge of a break through and the men holding the purse pulled the rug out.

Untold millions were spent for the simple task of telling little girls to stay away from Tech. All those dreams and hopes for a more sensitive and caring future crushed by the patriarchy.

Ralph L said...

Ceilings are stronger than glass in the Big House.

farmgirl said...

Bernie Sanders wife bankrupt(ed) the college she was president of. It was being investigated at one time- I wonder what could have happened to that story? Shady shit went down, too.

I’d like to see her in jail, truly.

farmgirl said...

Pretty sure, Howard, she let herself be used.
Is she that stupid, then?

farmgirl said...

“… crushed by the patriarchy.”

Well, that explains why you detest Peterson- lol

Drago said...

Howard: "Just like Gizlady Maxwell, Elizabeth Wendell Holmes is sent to jail for crimes men have committed for centuries and got away with it because of the Good Old Boys Club."

Elizabeth should have promised "10% for the Big Guy", then the DOJ/FBI would have been working for her and ensuring everything and anything that threatened her would disappear.....

n.n said...

Lying. NYT. Touche.

cubanbob said...

Howard that was a great piece of sarcasm. Well done.

Howard said...

I know it's hard to keep up farmgirl. I'll start pitching softballs underhand so you can stay in the game

farmgirl said...

Heh- gee, thanks Howard.
I’m not gonna fall for it, though ;0)

effinayright said...
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Sally327 said...

Before Elizabeth there was Robert Vesco and Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff. I'm sure others, these are just some of the ones I remember.

She testified, I guess it didn't help that much. Maxwell did not testify and I wonder if it would have helped her, the posh English accent and all.

Hopefully one of the lessons that will come out of all this is that anyone wearing a black turtleneck or otherwise attempting to mimic Steve Jobs in appearance or behavior should be treated like the fraud they most likely are.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients. Ms. Holmes was acquitted on four counts related to patients who took Theranos’s blood tests and one related to advertisements that the patients saw."

And that's just insane. how do you find her defrauding investors with fake tests, and not find her guilty for defrauding the patients who took the fake tests?

Matt Harris said...

The difference is there wasn't a real crime for Martha Stewart.

Owen said...

Howard @ 8:13: You have an impressively rich fantasy life. Have you spent the least amount of time or effort following the Theranos trainwreck? “Bad Blood” and the original WSJ investigation into her magic show were eye-openers. Yes, Silicon Valley is full of geniuses —and people who imagine themselves to be. To some fools with money to burn, they look the same.

William said...

I won't feel safer if she's behind bars. I haven't followed the case, but I got the impression that she fooled people who wanted to be fooled and people who, had they done anything by way of due diligence, should have spotted the scam. Still, it was a huge fraud and money was lost. Perhaps the authorities should work out something in the way of community service instead of prison. I think if she was sentenced to be the home care attendant of Jerry Nadler or Joe Biden that would be sufficient punishment. Just helping Jerry put on a fresh Depends or giving Joe a shower should give her pause to contemplate the wages of sin, and we would be spared the expense on incarcerating her.

Readering said...

Huh, I knew one of the main victims of Holmes's wire fraud. Invested and lost $6 million. Nice to have that much money to lose.

I represented the corporate victim in an 80's fraud scheme that seemed large at the time. A number of people went to prison. The main fraudster got out, moved to a different part of the country and did the same thing. Died in prison.

gadfly said...

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) formally resigned from Congress on Monday, as the California Republican departs to run former President Trump's new media and technology company.

No more frivolous lawsuits from Nunes, which numbered more than a dozen. For example, now there will be no need to prove that Esquire and Ryan Lizza were inaccurately reporting that the only farm that Devin ever lived on in California was long gone and his Mom, Dad and brother moved on to an Iowa farm where labor shortages resulted in hiring unregistered Mexicans. The court ruled Nunes had not met the high bar of showing "actual malice" in reporting info gathered about a public figure.

So Trump, the Big Tech expert, hired Nunes who can barely spell Big Tech, to run his next company headed for yet another huge bankruptcy designed to ripoff investors.

House members now number 433.

Mary Beth said...

By all accounts, she was on the verge of a break through and the men holding the purse pulled the rug out.

By whose accounts? The machines were in stores, giving false results.

Bob Boyd said...

Fauci is recommending the President make taking her tests mandatory.

TheDopeFromHope said...

How is she paying her attorneys' fees? Her law firm, Williams & Connelly, doesn't come cheap. Her fees must be north of $25 million, easy.

At trial, her attorneys harped on about her never selling any Theranos stock and her annual salary was reported to be six figures, never over a million. What gives?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

how do you find her defrauding investors with fake tests, and not find her guilty for defrauding the patients who took the fake tests?

I’d also like to hear that reasoning. Theranos was faking results at the end because the volume of tests processed was too high to keep up with. They reported false results to cancer patients! This detail intrigues me and I think if fewer Deep State Insiders were invested in this scam the media coverage of the trial would have garnered at least a tenth of the breathless attention the finance Media gave to promoting Holme’s “breakthroughs.”

James K said...

Before Elizabeth there was Robert Vesco and Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff. I'm sure others, these are just some of the ones I remember.

I wouldn't put Milken in the same bucket as Stanford and Madoff. Those guys ran Ponzi schemes and bilked people out of millions. Milken had some technical securities violations in the process of creating billions in genuine wealth for a lot of people.

Jaq said...

Remember when Comey bragged about throwing Stewart in prison without ever proving any underlying crime? He got her on a process crime. Isn't America great? Martha should have been keeping up her contributions to The Party and she would not have had such trouble. That's why America is so great, everybody knows how to keep out of trouble, and only the stupid end up in stir.

CWJ said...

Martha Stewart's case was when I first learned that you could go to jail for "lying" about something that wasn't illegal. It blew my mind then, and it still does now.

Bruce Hayden said...

“Before Elizabeth there was Robert Vesco and Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff. I'm sure others, these are just some of the ones I remember”

Milkin really doesn’t belong in this group. His guilty plea was coerced the same way that Gen Flynn’s was - through promised prosecution of a close relative, in his case, his brother. He created a brand new market, out of thin air, that is even bigger today. He was a political target, having been targeted by Wall Street opponents who lost financially because he took money away from them. But not by lying, but rather by inventing a more efficient market.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...
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Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

Bernie Sanders is a lovable Sesame Street character named Ernie. Love him, won't you?

Please ignore his financial hypocrisy.

Freder Frederson said...

General Mattis should be in the crosshairs as well given his completely corrupted decision-making while on active duty when he was driving use of Theranos products in the military.

Luckily, the bureaucracy of the Pentagon worked in this case and the military did not buy into the scam. Part of the fraud was that Holmes claimed the machines were being used in helicopters in Afghanistan. They were not.

ccscientist said...

The problem with the real world, ie technology, is that it may not bow to your hype (unless you are elon musk-level genius). Tech is hard and what Holmes was promising was very very difficult.

Joe Smith said...

'when she gets to prison, will she Still use the fake low voice?'

Depends...

The low voice would set her up as the Alpha, and she would pull more of the hotter chicks.

But since dudes are in women's prisons now, maybe the girly voice would work better.

The book is fascinating btw.

I worked my entire career in Silicon Valley and I've seen a lot of chicanery. At first I was taken aback at the brazenness of it all.

But when I really thought about it, she didn't do anything much different than any founder looking for seed money.

Yes, it was fraud. But by SV standards it wasn't even that outrageous.

Critter said...

The Theranos case says a lot about celebrities serving on boards of directors, and their lack of attention to the business. A red flag always goes up in my mind when I see the likes of Kissinger, Mattis, etc. on a board. Shareholders beware!

retail lawyer said...

Next chapter: She plays up the new mom angle at her sentencing. Abuse victim didn't do the trick.

J Melcher said...

Martha Stewart's case was when I first learned that you could go to jail for "lying" about something that wasn't illegal. It blew my mind then, and it still does now.

Never talk to LE without your lawyer present. You and the cops aren't on the same team. They are your adversaries. They are there to gather evidence and they are professional witnesses.


Yeah both right. This is the more important development than the underlying white collar crimes. This goes along with the publication, during the Flynn news cycle, of the fact that Federal LEOs (notably the FBI) is not using (post-Edison recording technology available this past 130 years) audio recordings of interviews, but handwritten notes by the agents to "prove" a statement -- false or otherwise -- was actually made.

So, the FBI shows up and explicitly tells you (verbally) that you are NOT a target of an inquiry. They just want your help as a subject matter expert or a potential witness or a casual contact of some other person of interest, and they ask you questions, and they write down -- after the fact and maybe a day or so later - what they interpret you to have answered. Then, they elevate their illegible day-of-interview notes at attachments to federal form FD-302 and it becomes admissible evidence in whatever case they make. If you are very very lucky YOUR remarks and perspective may be considered the truth and contradictory versions of events by other witnesses and subject matter experts -- your peers and co-workers and friends and family -- will be the ones accused of lying. Again, the luckiest and best outcome is that YOU will become responsible for the harassment of your social circle. A bit of bad luck, and YOU become the target of the "inquiry".

So the consequence is that witnesses and subject matter experts will make themselves unavailable to to investigators. So the quality of interviews and inquiries and investigations gets worse. So innocent people will be mistakenly accused due to misinterpreted evidence and guilty people will escape for lack of corroborative background information.

THIS is a problem the chief executive COULD and SHOULD change with his pen and his phone. Just as BlackLivesMatter won the argument about requiring street cops to wear body cameras, the public should demand the White House issue executive orders requiring federal investigators to record all interviews. The ONLY reason not to make use of at least audio recording technologies that are-- I say again in some version or another 130 years old -- proven and admissible in court and easily stipulated by all parties at trial is to privilege the government. Were I a judge, or even a lawyer, I'd argue the practice is unconscionable.

J Melcher said...

Did anybody get charged for "lying to federal agents" in the aftermath of Solyndra?

There was a federal investigation during the bankruptcy actions when Solyndra fell apart. But as I recall the questions of falsity went way back to the initial grant applications. Again, were any of the "Green" industrialists making excuses for why solar power didn't work, get new fresh charges for "lying to federal investigators" in 2011?

Because if not, the OTHER problem with the whole "lying to the feds" situation is selective application based on which political faction is investing in what.

Gabriel said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_the_belly

Aggie said...

She had a pretty good con going there for a while, and had another one going during the trial, but....Cons are hard to work once the marks are on to you.