Writes by Amy Chozick, in "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth/The black turtlenecks are gone. So is the voice. As the convicted Theranos founder awaits prison, she has adopted a new persona: devoted mother" (NYT).
"I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person. She’s gentle and charismatic, in a quiet way. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), 'Amy Chozick, you got rolled!' I vigorously disagreed! You don’t know her like I do! But... something... had been gnawing on me since I first met Ms. Holmes. How do you have an honest conversation with a person whose fraud trial has played out so publicly? I tried to ask Ms. Holmes this directly. How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"
Go to the link to read the long article and try to figure out how much of what Holmes wanted Holmes got from the NYT.
If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you probably think her feigned perma-hoarseness was part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously. If you spend time with Ms. Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Elizabeth Holmes, it was both....
Ms. Holmes is unlike anyone I’ve ever met — modest but mesmerizing. If you are in her presence, it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her....
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64 comments:
These were old men that saw her as a granddaughter and didn’t recognize her sociopathy. Theranos to anyone remotely aware of blood testing was a fraud from the beginning, as was the obvious fake persona Holmes. Also it appears the film which was to star Jennifer Lawrence got canned since there are so many documentaries on YouTube
As @Gator said: When I first read news articles about Theranos' claims, I said to my wife that they were physically impossible. After my post-doc, I worked at a company building a fully automated analyzer for antibodies or antigens found in donated blood (height of the AIDS crisis for transfusions)--what Holmes claimed and the whole second-coming of Steve Jobs vibe convinced me that she was a fraud. I read John Carreyrou's series in the WSJ when it came out in installments--wonderful piece of journalism.
About this: "it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her."
All I can say is that TWO of my family members, one a doctor, were thoroughly contemptuous of her, her fake stylistics and her ludicrous claims, FROM THE START - even as various celebs and members of the elite, whose credentials we get cited to us here, of course, were taken in by what they wanted to be taken in by.
Theranos’ board was loaded with political heavyweights. Were there any biologists?
I know her only from imitations that a male staffer on the Armstrong and Getty show would do whenever her name came up in the news, in response to that item, putting forth some unlikely low voice truth. Those were pre-exposure.
So there was a ridiculous lady out there. So far from taken seriously, it was material for comedy.
so is the voice
oh, Please Tell Me, that she's going to switch to blasé ford's little girl voice!
That would be Hilarious!!
There’s a useful one-word descriptor for “Liz” Holmes, and we all know it.
Sociopath.
I doubt prison will make any deep impression on her. Manipulating others is her life’s work, and she is already scripting her next act.
Apparently some people just can’t bring themselves to see that a woman could be such a lying phony, just like some men are. Delusions about the world being a better place if women were in control die hard.
She's a skilled manipulator, and she has that peculiar trait I think that many highly intelligent sociopaths has: She has very high energy levels and is always 'on' - and therefore capable of wearing most people down with sheer wattage. If her personality was shifted a bit differently on the spectrum, with that kind of focus and drive she could have been a good executive. But she's just a con, and with her narcissism, that's all she'll ever be. The reported got rolled, but she got rolled by one of the best.
Holmes was the public face of a scheme she did not invent. The elites on the board knew perfectly well what they were doing, and when it collapsed Holmes took the blame as had been intended all along (though perhaps not by her).
If you ask a con artist whether they’re conning you, the answer is a bit on the predictable side. To quote the gullible Amy Chosick herself: “But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?”
Answer, you don’t. Assume your editor was right and you got rolled.
I find the way this sentence begins to be particularly infuriating: "If you hate Elizabeth Holmes …
Why do I have to hate someone to be skeptical of them? Do I have to hate Kay LeClaire or Elizabeth Warren to be skeptical of their claims of Native American descent? Do I have to hate Ann Althouse to be skeptical of some of her posts?
Also, I regard Chosick’s next sentence as being in its own way worse: ”If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously.” That’s just bull. Chosick could have, should have, met with other successful female entrepreneurs — they’re out there, folks! — and checked whether they have to put on fake voice inflections to be taken seriously.
Holmes conned a lot of people, she gobbled up venture capital that might have helped a lot of other startups, and she probably made it that much harder for the next female entrepreneurs that come along. She deserves no thanks for any of that.
Here's what the con artist knows that others won't admit: People HATE being told they were conned. They just will never believe it no matter how true it is.
And that's a powerful thing. In the wrong hands, that observation leads people to some dark places. In the hands of a literal psychopath, this knowledge leads to very dark places.
Holmes is a great con artist. She should have gone into solar rather than blood tests.
People believe what they want to believe.
Warren talked yesterday about knowing when you are being manipulated.
But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"
No woman must be made to feel bad about, or responsible for, anything, ever.
If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously.
But she was a fraud! She didn't have a brilliant idea. She shouldn't have been taken seriously.
The true "impossible gymnastics" women and men have to perform to succeed in this realm is to come up with an idea and make it work.
The Holmes case is not evidence of the difficulty women face in the VC world. Just the opposite, actually. These men, these smart, experienced, successful, tough-minded men, were eager to take her seriously. They wanted to be the ones who supported a woman in this capacity. All else equal, a man could probably never have gotten into the same room with these guys. He would have been weeded out by underlings and due diligence.
Amy Chozick should pay attention to how much she cherishes her beliefs here. How many other bullshitters does she believe because she wants to believe? And why?
Most of us should pay attention to that more, I think.
What the world needs now
Is cruel neutrality, sweet cruel neutrality.
"If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously."
No. If you are primed to believe that the world is one big conspiracy against women, you are primed to give her the benefit of the doubt, and you will be taken in by her fraud.
Heh. The editor said it best: “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”
Holmes got everything she could have wanted in that article. The controlling man, the sexual assault, the devoted mother, the love story, the loss of the beloved dog and her relentless search, etc., and, of course, a couple insinuations that going after Holmes was more about misogyny than fraud. It practically reads like Holmes wrote it.
Holmes' whole "idea" was "wouldn't it be great to get all these tests off of a drop of blood" which is NOT quite the same as figuring out how.
Yeah, it's hard to know if you're being conned by a woman who's conned some of the most astute men in the world (whose gonads, no doubt, played a large role) if she's nursing her infant on a "white couch."
This is not what's known in the trade as a telling detail. It is instead the tell that tells us the reporter is being willingly conned by a woman who, exactly like her, had her first child in her late 30s after devoting herself to her career.
This is not Chozick's first time being conned. Hillary Clinton predated Holmes by several years.
Critter,
Repeal the 19th?
"Theranos’ board was loaded with political heavyweights. Were there any biologists?"
The joke about it being better suited to overthrow a small country than to run a medical devices firm was remarkably on the nose. Kissinger, retired Generals, ....
Thomas Dolby - She Blinded Me With Science
The moral of the story: a fool and his capital are soon parted...
Tina Turner - Private Dancer
I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money
I'll do what you want me to do
I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money
And any old music will do
and be wary of exercising liberal license to indulge diversity [dogma] (e.g. sexism). Not necessarily in that order.
"Theranos’ board was loaded with political heavyweights. Were there any biologists?"
Planned Parenthood Federation board is loaded with political heavyweights. Are there are any doctors? If yes, would you want a doctor with a pro-death orientation perchance a "private dancer" (e.g. "#CecileTheCannibal) to operate on you?
"But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"
And you're a reporter for the NY Times? Exactly how many other interviews have you done in which your subject found it absolutely necessary to be chest-feeding at that exact moment...I mean other than perhaps Pete Buttigieg?
"it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her"
Just goes to show that key to the con is the mindset of the connee. Also, that Holmes is very good at it.
"If you are primed to believe that the world is one big conspiracy against women"
Why are feminism and "anti-racism" not considered cons?
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don't look at their faces
And you don't ask their names
You don't think of them as human
You don't think of them at all
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eyes on the wall
- Private Dancer
Substitute Theranos with Planned Parenthood Federation et al, men with women... feminists, and "them" refers to babies. Invest.
"Yeah, it's hard to know if you're being conned by a woman who's conned some of the most astute men in the world (whose gonads, no doubt, played a large role) if she's nursing her infant on a "white couch." "
I thought the same thing, but I will give Chozik credit for some lapover coverage of her ass. She wrote: "But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"
"how could I ask" — that means it at least crossed her mind that this could be a con, but how could you bring yourself to challenge her when she's white and providing white milk to her white infant on a white couch?
I think New York Times writers need a bit more experience.
It seemed so obvious to me at the beginning. I would have thought a sophisticated investor would jump in at the beginning, and after the stock doubled, or tripled, baled out.
Or maybe they did. And drove the stock price through the roof. And then some of them got caught.
Gabriel said, “Holmes was the public face of a scheme she did not invent. The elites on the board knew perfectly well what they were doing…”
WTF? She started this as an undergrad at Stanford and it was all her idea. She was too ignorant to know that the outcome she wanted was impossible with capillary blood and would never work; only arterial blood works for most of the tests she claimed her magic tech would do. She appropriated the “test on chip” enthusiasm and scammed everyone else involved. Her Machiavelli assertions are weak given her boyfriend was a late addition to the insider game Holmes was playing. I’m surprised to see someone white knighting for her here! As others have noted she steered way clear of any board members with medical knowledge and common sense. The group of old white men are notable for being political actors with zero common sense. Their most prominent shared characteristics are wealth, vanity and political connectedness coupled with zero tech skills and zero biomedical knowledge: perfect marks for Holmes. Hell the generals never even knew she was lying about the “box” being deployed overseas with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, “facts” that should have been immediately uncovered by active military leaders paying even the slightest attention to what the company they “oversaw” was doing. Board members are required by Sarbanes-Oxley regulations to sign off on the veracity of all company statements.
If you are correct Gabriel then Mattis et al should be prosecuted for the scam too. Notice Murdoch claims ignorance and throws the generals under the Theranos bus. Fine, Rupert, you’re dumb, but did you or did you not sign off on the annual reports?
that means it at least crossed her mind that this could be a con
Empathetic and sympathetic leverage (e.g. throw granny off the cliff, handmaid's tale, critical race theory, rape culture, don't say...) opens a path to genocide?
The prudent course is to assume that a woman who so assiduously and for such a prolonged period carried on an elaborate deception of so many people, and who has not yet begun her prison sentence and thus has every reason to display herself as "preemptively reformed"...is still working a con.
Guys, Holmes was not the mastermind. Nineteen-year-olds with great ideas can't get the kinds of meetings she got with the people she met with.
The elites on the board were not conned by Holmes and their "aw shucks she shore fooled me hyuck hyuck" routine is revolting. They wanted everybody's health data going through one company, because that would be incredibly valuable information: to people who manufacture pharmaceuticals, insurers, government...
They knew perfectly well what they were doing and they let Holmes be the face of it because their lapdog media was dying to tell that kind of story. And they let Holmes take the blame, and their lapdog media is perfectly happy to tell the story that she shore fooled those old grandpas hyuck hyuck.
That is the thing about liars- many of them are astonishingly good at it. That is also the thing about reporters- they are either too stupid to have their guard up against such people, or they are are corrupt enough to not care when the lie is something they want to publish.
Makes me think of "Blood Will Out" by Walter Kirn about the author's getting entwined in a con-man's web.
I know several very low-level medical types, lab technicians and the folks who work with them, the phlebotomists, who were all highly dubious of the whole proposition presented by Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. The lab techs were "How the f*ck is that supposed to work? We can't even do most of those tests with a 10cc ampule of blood, let alone one drop..."
Having brought that up, and made to feel like an idiot for presenting the idea to the actual people doing the work it was supposed to do, I wasn't really all that surprised when it turned out to be a huge fraud. All those high-and-mighty "intellectual giants" like Mattis? They were taken in by something that Army medics doing lab work caught on to, right from the start.
Makes you wonder, sometimes. How many of these "educated-yet-idiot" types are really fit for the purposes to which society has put them? They seem to be incessantly falling prey to things that people with far fewer credentials easily identify as scams. Frankly, one good test of something ought to be whether or not the adherents of it have fallen prey to other frauds, and when you consider that the vast majority of our "elites" all fell for the educational-industrial scam, wellllllll... Yeah. We gots us plenny' o' that-there eeevee-dence thing that these folks aren't all that f*cking bright.
Take a look at the people Holmes scammed. Really look. Notice anything? Yep; our best and brightest. Any wonder that Afghanistan turned into what it did, with a man of Mattis's intellectual caliber running the whole thing? Dude got scammed by a slick chick with a prospectus, and we wonder how the Taliban managed to be running the country a few short years after Mattis's tenure as commander and Secretary of Defense?
You keep doing the same thing, expecting different results? Supposedly, a sign of insanity. We keep putting all these over-qualified dumbasses in charge of things, experience complete and utter failure (always very well-documented and justified...), and then wonder why it happens over and over again. Anyone remember Vietnam? Note any similarities between Saigon, 1975 and Kabul, 2021?
Huh. Makes ya wonder, that does. Same crew of well-credentialed dolts running the show, and we make no protest, and take no corrective actions.
By rights, we ought to be looking at the entire process by which we produce men like Mattis, and doing some critical thinking. There are way too many of them infesting our military and government. He talks a great game, generates actually sh*tty performances...
The "tell" that the Holmes-was-the-mastermind story is false is the reaction of George Shultz when his grandson, who worked for Holmes, told him that the box didn't work.
If Shultz had been investing in Holmes because he believed in the box, he would have been very concerned that his money was tied up in a product that didn't work. Instead, he sicced Theranos lawyers on his own grandson that he had waiting there in his own home for that purpose. Why did he do such an extraordinary thing?
The box was not what Theranos' value proposition was about. The value proposition was the medical data on a huge population. The fiction of the box was to encourage huge numbers of people to submit their data for testing (hence the partnership with Walgreens). The potential to collect that data was the opportunity, the box was the hook to bring in the data.
The elite board is there to make money and get power by collecting Americans' medical data, their presence vouches for the box so they can get other big companies to work with them to get the data. Holmes was as much window dressing for the scheme as the box was.
The elite boards is super-smart people with a history of manipulating government and media to their own ends, and hyuck hyuck they shore got fooled. Look how they leaped to tell the media what suckers they are, hyuck hyuck.
And read the Times article here and note the questions the reporter never asks. Like "How were you, a nineteen-year-old with a bright idea but no experience or money, able to get these meetings with all these important people before you ever had a chance to charm them?" How did she get past all the staff these people have to screen them from people with bright ideas and no money?
The media is not interested in the real Theranos story now any more than they were when they were hyping the scam.
cassandra lite said:
"Yeah, it's hard to know if you're being conned by a woman who's conned some of the most astute men in the world (whose gonads, no doubt, played a large role) if she's nursing her infant on a "white couch."
I question your premise about "most astute men". I would suggest to you that if they were taken in by this very obvious con job, which was easily identified by a lot of very low-level lab worker types, then they're really not at all that "astute".
Instead, I would submit to you that most of them are actually "high in the hierarchy; low in actual merit", having gotten to where they are through connections, credentials, and nobody ever really looking too hard at their actual work product.
As I point out... Mattis? LOL... Great mouth on that boy, really low performance as a theater commander and Secretary of Defense. Most of the things that went wrong in Afghanistan during the 2021 "withdrawal" came from things that Mattis and his well-credentialed ilk were doing from 2001 onwards. Why do you think he'd do any better, dealing with someone like Holmes? In military-historical terms, Mattis is actually a post-turtle; you see the guy sitting there on top of it all, but when you go to look at the how and the why of his being in that elevated position... You can't find a damn thing to justify it. What has Mattis got going for him? What has he done, really?
All you need to know about the rest of the Theranos board is encapsulated in Mattis. Sad to say... I have to admit, I was taken in by his sweet-sounding BS myself, but on reflection and further observation, I have to say I was utterly wrong about the man. It's more than obvious from his performance that he's no Sam Damon; he's just a more glib Courtney Massengale, with better PR.
@Mike (MJB Wolf):I’m surprised to see someone white knighting for her here!
I am not white-knighting her at all. She knew what her part to play was and she participated for all she was worth.
She appropriated the “test on chip” enthusiasm and scammed everyone else involved.
How did she ever get that first meeting? "Hi I'm nineteen and I've never done anything and I have no money but here's my genius idea". Real businessmen and politicians and generals have staff to screen them from such people. No, the scheme needed someone like her in order to be media-proof, and they either sought her out or were waiting for someone like her to turn up.
Her Machiavelli assertions are weak... I agree that her boyfriend was not the mastermind either, but he's pretty clearly the one who recruited her to it.
given her boyfriend was a late addition to the insider game Holmes was playing.
She met him when she was 18.
If you are correct Gabriel then Mattis et al should be prosecuted for the scam too. Notice Murdoch claims ignorance and throws the generals under the Theranos bus. Fine, Rupert, you’re dumb, but did you or did you not sign off on the annual reports?
Yes to all this. That's why they are all so eager to look like dupes.
It practically reads like Holmes wrote it.
@Freeman Hunt, are you suggesting that there’s the slightest chance Holmes didn’t write it? It was Amy Chozick’s fingers on the keyboard, but it covered the topics Holmes wanted covered in the way Holmes wanted them covered using the concepts and words Holmes wanted her to use. If Chozick was in love with Holmes the piece couldn’t have been a whole lot more hagiographic.
Madoff and Holmes and SBF only duped morons.
No one with any street smarts lost money.
Only the Best and the Brightest fell for it.
The sad thing here is that lots of capital got wasted and there are many deserving biotechs that need money.
They wanted everybody's health data going through one company
A prelude to Obamacares.
So Holmes was a Mulvaney, Mandela, Floyd, Roe, Obama, Parks, "granny", a carbon atom, etc., who would be selected, exploited, rewarded for leverage. Nice.
Holmes was a feminist icon. Women, on the other hand, would be rewarded when following their interests, aptitude, training, and timely choices in context, in competition with men. Their dress did not earn them position but rather acknowledgement, their womb did not earn them accolades but rather appreciation, their sex was not a point of pride but rather as complementary by Her choice.
So why did the Times editor permit the publication of such an inaccurate piece of -- not reporting, just sort of feeling?
Because they have been whitewashing certain criminals, white and (much moreso) black, white collar or bomb throwing or subway-terrorizing, for half a century plus. This is just radical chic for the Burning Man generation.
Now they're even whitewashing their archives. This article made me search for an old NYT profile trying to rehabilitate Bernardine Dohrn after she and Bill "emerged" from hiding. Good thing I have hard copy because it has been disappeared from their search engine, likely because the extent of Dohrn's intense relationship with the Obamas is known now.
In that profile, they tackle Dohrn's recipe for homemade jam but don't discuss her involvement in the Brink's robbery/murders or the other cops she killed and maimed with nail bombs. Most ironically, as the kiddies she was raising then include Chesa Boudin.
Times editors knew when they published this propagandist crap that she had stolen the identities of customers in a baby boutique she worked in (under a fake name) to make the fake IDs used in the heists that left two cops and a security guard dead, and others shot and wounded in other robberies. But the profile was all tea and cookies, sunlight shining through windows -- it was even in the lifestyle section.
I'll have to find and scan the article about the "new domestic Bernardine" and post it, because editors at the Times are still trying to erase what they knew and when they knew it about Ayers, Dohrn, and their deep ties to both Obamas, which they also systematically mocked and denied throughout 2008. There is nothing too blood-drenched for the Times to whitewash, when they want to.
One wonders if, similarly, they ever ran this Therenos stuff by their science editors and got a thumbs down, but didn't publish it because they were still snowed by some version of Elizabeth Holmes.
It would certainly be consistent behavior by the NYT and the sociopathic criminals they love to love.
General 'Got conned by a not-so-good-looking Steve Jobs wannabe' Mattis.
Only the best and brightest...
Gabriel said...
How did she ever get that first meeting? "Hi I'm nineteen and I've never done anything and I have no money but here's my genius idea". Real businessmen and politicians and generals have staff to screen them from such people. No, the scheme needed someone like her in order to be media-proof, and they either sought her out or were waiting for someone like her to turn up.
She's every bit as much a biochemist, as AOC is a congress woman.
That is to say.. They are both actresses, that went to a casting call.. and were cast in their roles.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself THIS:
If Holmes (or AOC) weren't kinda (but not TOO) attractive females.. Would ANYONE EVER have heard of them?
Was Holmes eager to get, and play, the role? SURE! Was it just an act? I'll let y'all answer that
Frankly, I don't really see what is gained by imprisoning this woman. She's not violent. It seems unlikely she will be able to repeat the crime. She might even be able to repay some of what she stole if she were not imprisoned. Prison for white collar crimes doesn't make a lot of sense.
The only really interesting question is what she was thinking. And I doubt that she knows herself. Most major fraudsters start out legit, and then cut a few corners to make up for a little bad luck, and then find that the luck stays bad and the corners keep getting bigger. But she seems a bit different. She had very little scientific training, she had to rely on others for technical information. And they were relying on her for financial support. She started the whole thing, and was the front woman, but an awful lot of people must have realized something was way wrong. But the checks cleared.
As a programmer, I was involved in a project where a large utility was paying a shitload of money to a contractor to build a new Customer Information System. I got e-mailed on Thursday, interviewed on Friday, flew in on Saturday, rented an apartment (with pool) on Sunday. I bought some pots and pans and frozen dinners, and started reading design documents all day. After a few months, it gradually dawned on me that the plan would not work, the project was ultimately going to fail, and the contractor would bill the mark for hundreds of millions before that happened. So what do you do? Break your lease, pay the penalty, and go look for a new job? They're not paying you to believe it will work. They're paying you to produce a design document for a particular process. You can do that. It's not a lie to say that implementing this process would accomplish the stated objectives. Of course, your document is necessary window-dressing for the massive grift. That's why they hired a competent analyst. To make it look good.
At the very beginning 19 year old Elizabeth Holmes was told by Dr. Phyllis Gardner, Professor of Medicine at Stanford Medical School, that her blood testing idea would never work. Dr. Gardner advised the young woman to complete her studies at Stanford but instead Elizabeth hired PhDs to bring her impossible idea to fruition. She drove biochemist Ian Gibbons to suicide with her irrational demands. She hounded and threatened any employee who dared tell anyone —including George Schultz’s grandson—the truth that her technology was a fraud.
Elizabeth—Liz—ran a very dangerous con.
If you are a pretty woman, you can get people to believe anything.
Where’d you get your fictional tale Gabriel? I’ve been following the Theranos story for years and know the answers to your rhetorical questions. If you don’t then I suggest you look up the female Stanford legend she conned into helping her in the beginning.
There exists a subset of people who lose all power of discernment in the presence of an attractive woman, especially if she seems intelligent. They will believe everything, agree with everything. Dangerous!
I'm sure there is a male equivalent. I suspect it's rich men. Have witnessed people practically worship rich men in-person.
Gabriel offers an interesting counter argument, but I'm not persuaded. George Schultz was 90 years old when he joined the board. 90 year olds are more easily taken advantage of than 50 year olds. Ms. Holmes encouraged the comparisons to Steve Jobs in order to buff her image as a tech savant. (I'll note that Steve Jobs was not a gifted computer architect or engineer, but he had a vision and successfully worked through others to achieve that vision.) Holmes was pushing something akin to cold fusion; it might some way, somehow, be possible with enough money and time. If the "real" goal of the board was to gain access to PHI, well that's useful, but not as profitable as owning the market for blood testing.
'If you are a pretty woman, you can get people to believe anything.'
She's no Victoria's Secret model.
You need to get out more : )
Prison for white collar crimes doesn't make a lot of sense.
So how would you punish white collar criminals and seek to deter future white collar crime?
It was a huge scam, and she invented it. That probably takes as much imagination and drive as inventing Apple's Lisa. She really knew how to surf the waves of feminism, miraculous tech innovations, and genius innovators. These are things that exist.
You just have to convince people that you're the latest embodiment of them.....I don't understand how AI works, but it seems to me no less miraculous than a lab test that can test a drop of blood for every known disease in creation. There are lots of things in the world around me that I wouldn't believe in if it weren't for the fact that they exist. That's what got her over....Those two kids will someday face an existential crisis. They were put on this earth to keep their mother out of jail. Motherhood for her is probably as much a scam as being a tech entrepeneur. Well, for all that, maybe she's good at it and things will work out for them. It didn't work out so well for Madoff's kids, but who knows.
A normal NYT reader will be gulled, again, by the article.
Agree with Michael. Elizabeth Holmes was always a huckster, her goal was to be the first female billionaire, not solve cancer. She just used a bunch of stupid old white men. I read the full article on my yahoo feed. The author is as nutty as Holmes. How she finds any sympathy towards he is ridiculous, and yes she should face real time for fraud. Not sure what Jupiter is thinking but if someone steals money from said person prison time is warranted?
You guys are missing the point. Elizabeth Holmes failed. She's a failure. She's in prison for fraud. That's not a win. Yeah, some people are STILL taken in, but so what? She's in prison.
The smart, successful cons aren't punished, even when everyone knows about them.
She should have been a politician.
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