Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Criminal Fraud Charge Update

Everybody is asking the same question:

Is she going to use the voice in the trial? The Bene Gesserit witch must take the stand.
 
pgwenthold said:
Just saw this

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-trial-theranos/card/ftW5y3vKBErH8CjsaOW4

(sorry WSJ)

She added Pfizer and Schering-Plough logos to the letter she sent to Walgreens to give the impression that they endorsed her work. They said they had nothing to do with her.

This can't be helpful.
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She wasn't trying to give a false impression, she said, but after hearing the testimony at trial, "I wish I had done it differently."
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"If wishes were fishes, we'd never go hungry." :cool:
 
Complete running commentary on how the trial is going, plus a lot of background info in the NYT.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/23/technology/elizabeth-holmes-trial-theranos

I liked this:
Court is back in session. Ms. Holmes tried to make eye contact with the jurors as they filed in, but only one juror appeared to look up.
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But the guts of the defense appears to be this (as some have speculated):
As she has defended herself in court, Elizabeth Holmes has made the arguments that longtime lawyers anticipated.

Ms. Holmes, the founder of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos, has sought to shift blame onto other Theranos employees with more technical skills. She has tried to poke holes in prosecutors’ arguments that she lied about working with drug companies. And, the lawyers said, she has tried to appear sympathetic and down to earth by showing up to court hand-in-hand with her mother and wearing clothing appropriate for a courtroom instead of the black turtlenecks she was once famous for wearing.

It’s all part of painting the picture, they said, of Ms. Holmes as a well-meaning but ultimately unsuccessful executive, rather than someone who intentionally misled investors and should be convicted of fraud.
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I have a ready supply of popcorn. ;)
 
Jokes aside, I am very curious if she used her obviously fake deep voice, or talked normally. Is there video anywhere available?

From the various documentaries I've seen, the voice thing is always what threw me for a loop. It seemed obvious to me that she was intentionally pitching her voice much deeper than was comfortable for her, and I was shocked that nobody was willing to point out this bizarre piece of performance at the time.
 
There's a video on YouTube of an old interview (I can't remember who with) where she gets a bit excited/animated talking and drops the deep voice schtick. Then she slips back into it once she realizes.
 
One thing that nobody has really addressed, to my knowledge, is what her role was in actually "inventing" the product used. She is not a scientist or engineer, and has precious little education/training in microbiology or blood testing. As near as I can tell, she came up with an "idea" and ran with that. This would be similar to someone saying, wouldn't it be great if we had a device that scans you and tells you what is making you ill? Just like the Star Trek medical scanner thingee. It's a great idea to be sure, but the trick is to actually have the nuts and bolts of how it would work in the real world. I don't see where she personally took that step.

I don't think she actually had anything to do with making the Edison machine work. Early on she had an engineer (I think this is the guy who committed suicide?) that designed the initial machine. I'm sure her name is on the patent, but having patents myself I know that very often a company's CEO will have their name as inventor regardless if they actually did anything. I've worked with a few extremely smart engineers in my career, and I doubt she could hold her own in a room with them.

So it seems to me her only real contribution, and not one to be taken lightly, is raising money. She was phenomenal at this part. She raised a lot of money from investors. But so much press at the time described her as a genius, implying that she was the brains behind some new technology. But I don't think that was the case at all. I don't think she did much more than come up with an idea of a magical machine, and then someone else tried to actually make it work in reality. Of course, her magical machine was not possible and now it sounds like her defense is that she had no idea the people in her company couldn't design a real life magic machine.
 
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Monza said:
One thing that nobody has really addressed, to my knowledge, is what her role was in actually "inventing" the product used. She is not a scientist or engineer, and has precious little education/training in microbiology or blood testing. As near as I can tell, she came up with an "idea" and ran with that. This would be similar to someone saying, wouldn't it be great if we had a device that scans you and tells you what is making you ill? Just like the Star Trek medical scanner thingee.
...snip...
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Sums up the era of Kickstarter. Who says you must obey the laws of physics eh?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Everybody is asking the same question:

Is she going to use the voice in the trial? The Bene Gesserit witch must take the stand.
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I just heard her on CNN. I'm not sure I've heard her speak for as long as I did today. The voice is so clearly forced, such an odd affectation.
 
Monza said:
.....
So it seems to me her only real contribution, and not one to be taken lightly, is raising money. She was phenomenal at this part. She raised a lot of money from investors.
.....
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It continues to be perplexing that so many really smart, tough people gave her so much money. I can only imagine that once she got one celebrity investor, she used their name to get the next one, then she had two big names and everybody assumed that somebody else must have checked her out.
 
Bob001 said:
It continues to be perplexing that so many really smart, tough people gave her so much money. I can only imagine that once she got one celebrity investor, she used their name to get the next one, then she had two big names and everybody assumed that somebody else must have checked her out.
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I would say the evidence is that their marketing is untruthful!
 
Bob001 said:
It continues to be perplexing that so many really smart, tough people gave her so much money. I can only imagine that once she got one celebrity investor, she used their name to get the next one, then she had two big names and everybody assumed that somebody else must have checked her out.
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I'm reading John Carreyrou's Bad Blood at present: it makes a lot of things about the various investors and how Holmes lied to them a lot clearer, how she exploited connections through family and friends, used severe legal heat, even got "Mad Dog" Mattis to try to bully an inconvenient Lt Colonel...But mostly she lied, lied and lied some more, even to the FDA.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
I'm reading John Carreyrou's Bad Blood at present: it makes a lot of things about the various investors and how Holmes lied to them a lot clearer, how she exploited connections through family and friends, used severe legal heat, even got "Mad Dog" Mattis to try to bully an inconvenient Lt Colonel...But mostly she lied, lied and lied some more, even to the FDA.
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It is rather unfair to accuse her of lying when the fault was clearly that Reality™️ refused to conform to her wishes.

Remember she is of the comfortable class, these folk are used to the world conforming to them.
 
Darat said:
It is rather unfair to accuse her of lying when the fault was clearly that Reality™️ refused to conform to her wishes.

Remember she is of the comfortable class, these folk are used to the world conforming to them.
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Drat me and my simplistic Methodist-derived view of things like truth!

And double drat me for having the temerity to have studied some sciences and having a grasp on scientific methods and reading data!

And treble drat me for having worked in healthcare and knowing a thing or 2 about blood tests!

I know realise that, of course, as a lesser being I should know that this counts for nothing...

;)
 
Carrot Flower King said:
Drat me and my simplistic Methodist-derived view of things like truth!

And double drat me for having the temerity to have studied some sciences and having a grasp on scientific methods and reading data!

And treble drat me for having worked in healthcare and knowing a thing or 2 about blood tests!

I know realise that, of course, as a lesser being I should know that this counts for nothing...

;)
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Yes. Yes. Yes. But what about your Fear of Missing Out? :hit:
 
Bob001 said:
It continues to be perplexing that so many really smart, tough people gave her so much money. I can only imagine that once she got one celebrity investor, she used their name to get the next one, then she had two big names and everybody assumed that somebody else must have checked her out.
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This is the thing that always boggles my mind. You would think that really rich people, when hearing a pitch for a grandeose adventure with revolutionary technology, would know enough to call a few of the experts in the world to see if the claims had any chance of working and not merely rely on the opinion of a college dropout?

You don't have the resources to find the names of the top microfluidics people at Berkeley to at least ask, I've got a proposal that claims it will do this. Is there any chance in hell of it working?
 
pgwenthold said:
This is the thing that always boggles my mind. You would think that really rich people, when hearing a pitch for a grandeose adventure with revolutionary technology, would know enough to call a few of the experts in the world to see if the claims had any chance of working and not merely rely on the opinion of a college dropout?

You don't have the resources to find the names of the top microfluidics people at Berkeley to at least ask, I've got a proposal that claims it will do this. Is there any chance in hell of it working?
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When you are surrounded by “yes” people it is hard not to believe the crap they tell you, such as you being the smartest person they know, why would you need to consult with anyone else!

ETA: But of course the above is a generalisation to make a funny. Many will have done what you say and didn’t invest.
 
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bruto said:
I think that's a big factor here, and one might remember that for the very rich, what seems like a big investment might be pocket change for them. What might seem like Russian roulette to many of us is a lottery ticket to some.
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I was going add something similar to what you say but my wife called me for lunch (actually what she said was, "Gord. Can you come and open a can of soup?"). But to follow upon Darat's subsequent posts, there is a class of folks, somewhat richer than I and less rich than Bill Gates, who will depend on what others are doing as a clue to what is a good investment or deal. The ones who always show up in the media stories are the recently widowed widows. They have no exposure to the real world of investing and are easily scammed.
 
Bob001 said:
It continues to be perplexing that so many really smart, tough rich people gave her so much money. I can only imagine that once she got one celebrity investor, she used their name to get the next one, then she had two big names and everybody assumed that somebody else must have checked her out.
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ftfy.

They had money to spare, so why not gamble a little of it on a risky investment that could make them even richer if it pays off? The problem is not that they didn't do due diligence - that is their right. The problem is that a certain amount of honesty is assumed and required by law.

But entrepreneurs and corporations are being dishonest and getting away with it all the time. Elizabeth Holmes's mistake was doing it in a field that cannot tolerate products that don't work. Had she promoted a new cancer treatment or engine emissions control that didn't work, she probably would have gotten away with it - if she wasn't a woman.
 
She seems normal.

FFoQJUsVIAEqjeV
 
Bloomberg thinks all her crying on the witness stand will make her sympathetic to the juries.

Does anyone really think that a trial over someone who conned others out of their money, that the jury is going to say, "Well, she seems so sincere"?

I mean, that's the whole point. She's all a sham.
 
carlitos said:
She seems normal.

[qimg]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FFoQJUsVIAEqjeV?format=jpg&name=large[/qimg]
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Wot???? Only 10 minutes for prayer? Does not God require a greater commitment than that if you are going to scam people out of millions? (I'm only basing this on what the TV evangelists inform me. Where is she sending an offering for a vial of holy water from the Sea of Galilee?) :boggled:
 
Although the handwriting is pretty hard not to notice, I give it a tentative miss, in part because I have known some people who had what looked like infantile or just bad handwriting, but were anything but. They just were not good at penmanship, for reasons ranging from neurological to visual to pedagogical to who knows. And also I do not know if Holmes is left handed. Not all lefties make what some might consider an undue effort to hide their natural back slant. She was, after all, writing a note to herself, and not to someone expected to show it around. While bad handwriting can be indicative of many things, it can also be a blind alley. But she still ought to know how to spell "banana."
 
I have really poor handwriting even though I still write a lot with a pen and paper. I even journal sometimes, write gratitude lists, and self-motivate in writing. And I still find her diary page creepy. Not to mention that I'm a little miffed how this spoiled brat was at the Raffles Hotel Singapore from her scammy proceeds.

CRISP AND CONCISE
 
Is it lying if you believe it yourself?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...holmes-claims-to-remember-things-differently/

Yesterday, Leach pointed out that Gibbons used the future tense and that the deck was riddled with “TBD.” Holmes acknowledged that TBD means “to be determined,” but she wouldn’t concede the point. She said “there was still work to be done” on the device but that at the time she believed version 4.0 could really do any test, even though it didn’t exist yet.

When it did eventually exist, it couldn’t do “any test.” At best, the most tests Theranos could do using its own technology was 12.
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Gord_in_Toronto said:
Off to the jury!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59688405



Do not believe the man behind the green curtain.
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Don't blame him for saying something like that but it is disingenuous. Of course, investors do have a duty to do due diligence and to anyone with half a brain this "opportunity" should have set all the warning bells ringing. However the investors aren't on trial and what they should have done does not excuse that she lied and covered up for years.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Is it lying if you believe it yourself?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...holmes-claims-to-remember-things-differently/
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It’s lying when you tell investors it can do something when you know it can’t. And when you tell investors it’s being used by DOD in the battlefield.

I keep seeing that Theranos devices could do “up to 12 tests.” I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I think there’s significant questions about the accuracy of anything done on a Theranos device and the consistency of the device’s performance. The device, to my understanding, was a mess inside and there was significant risk of cross contamination with other samples.

But if it’s true -that they could accurately and consistently run 12 tests on a drop or two of blood- then that was pretty useful and amazing in and of itself. The docs would love to have such a device in their clinics. Why couldn’t they just be up front with what they could do. There was no need to lie.

I just don’t think it’s true.
 
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