How To Lose 4.5 Billion in a Year

#26
#26
BowlBrother85 said:
Yes. John Carreyrou did some great reporting. It's a great book. What I really liked was the courage that two young people, Tyler Schultz and Erika Cheung, showed in the face of much older, wealthier and powerful people. They knew there was fraud at hand and that it could place lives at risk. They stuck to their convictions and refused to be intimidated by Balwani and Holmes and their attorneys. I love stories like that.

Elizabeth Holmes tried to treat the very specialized science of phlebotomy as if it was just another telecommunications field waiting for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to "disrupt" it. It was dangerously arrogant. It also shows how surprisingly gullible we are as a society. We believe what the people we respect believe, without scrutiny. Some very well-accomplished people (although, with no medical training) were suckered. Frist, of course, is a world-renowned doctor.
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Reading that book made me appreciate the quote "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." All those heavy hitters on the board and all those multi-millionaires/billionaires that invested in the company weren't doing that because they had to, were trying to build a name for themselves, or because they needed the money. They already had reputations and all the money they could possibly need. The only reason they would have invested in the company is because they believed in what they said they were trying to do and believed Holmes, and they just were all suckered. I think Schultz in particular and the older gentlemen looked at Holmes like a daughter and just believed everything she said. Don't think it was a coincidence so many older men were investors/board members.

Carreyrou has said in some interviews that large portions of the biotech community were privately very skeptical of Holmes and the things she was claiming, and many were not shocked one bit that it turned out to be a big fat zero. It also isn't a coincidence nobody from that world had anything to do with her.
 
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#27
#27
05_never_again said:
Anybody read the book Bad Blood? Fantastic storytelling. It's amazing just how much of a "zero" the company was - there was absolutely nothing there, even less than what existed at massive frauds like Enron and WorldCom. The machine was never even close to getting off the ground, never remotely close to being able to do what they said he could do. It was "fake it til you make it" to the extreme. Much of Holmes's day-to-day running of the company consisted of her going somewhere to demonstrate the machine, being asked by somebody there if the machine could do a certain thing, her lying and saying "Yes," then coming back home to dictate to her employees that they had to make the machine do what the person was asking about.

A big red flag that nobody caught onto before it was too late - with the exception of Bill Frist, the Theranos board and investor group was filled with people with a ton of name recognition (Kissinger, the Waltons, etc.) but zero medical or healthcare experience.
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Look up ZZZZ Best. There is always a group of people out there that are willing to overlook and believe as long as the money sounds right.
 
#29
#29
There’s a pretty solid podcast that details the whole story called The Dropout. I believe they were going to continue to update the story as the trial unfolded.
 
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