OT but interesting: Theranos and the Silicon Valley culture...
I had never heard about this whole fiasco prior to a few months ago, and even then I knew very little about it.
This lady had people all over buffaloed on her little Ponzi scheme, from Rupert Murdock to the Clintons to Betsy DeVos.
The interview done with the journalist who exposed the whole thing lays out some very interesting (and troubling) things about the mentality behind the Silicon Valley culture.
HBO did a doc on it...it’s an interesting story and worth the watch
I saw an ad for it, which was what first got my attention, but haven't seen the documentary itself.
But thank you for the reference. I plan to see it (I got the HBO app when they were free streaming stuff, and I just might man up and pay for it to see that and a few other shows).
Also an excellent podcast - The Dropout
All people are sheep. Only the wool varies.
Oddly, the wool seems often to come in the form of a black turtleneck.
The book about Theranos was really interesting and sort of highlighted how much of a scam it was and how, despite AMPLE warning signs, people just ignored it because she seemed like a "visionary" and everyone believes that an entire industry is run by idiots and just takes some exceptional genius to upset.
Something else suggested was that, if anybody questioned her, it was based on sexism.
Where have I heard that before? Works with race too.
She's a complete nut job, and the very definition of a narcissist. She modeled herself after Steve Jobs, black turtleneck everyday, being a very firm manager, etc, without having actually engineered anything useful. Her deep voice and monotone were also fake, videos eventually surfaced of her unguarded, and speaking like a normal person.
Hard to believe she swindled so many successful people, and companies (looking at you Walgreens).
Nut job you say....
Avatar checks out.
That's a description that sounds remarkably similar to the logic that led a lot of people to vote for our current president.
Ever wonder how a sociopath looks and sounds? Check out Elizabeth Holmes. Fake voice, eyes, the whole package ...
It seems notable that Theranos drew very little interest among Silicon Valley VCs. I think her (VC) neighbor was the only one who defended her.
Elizabeth Holmes’ “voice” is straight out of a horror movie
I've been fascinated by all of this. I've consumed the podcast, hbo doc, and book Bad Blood.
I will only feel satisfied when she's locked up. Ruined so many lives.
I saw that interview and story a couple months ago, pretty fascinating how she was able to pull the wool over so many peoples eyes.
That said, as evil as Elizabeth Holmes is, I don't feel bad about certain people who fell for it. It brought a smile to my face that Betsy DeVos, for instance, got fleeced.
Not really a partisan thing. People (gullible ones) on both sides of the political aisle supported her.
Errol Morris getting taken in was a particular bummer for me. But yes, a wide range of people went along for at least part of the ride.
Fun, let's all play the
[Insert random picture of politician you despise with evil person because it must prove something]
Of course, we could just insert pictures of Trump with disgraced and imprisoned members of his own campaign and staff from Manafort to Gates to Flynn to Stone.
And his lifelong lawyer now sitting in jail who paid off the porn star...Of course, Trump never met Stormy and barely knew Mr. Cohen.
Right. Or Barak Hussein Obama's association with Saul Alinski or Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko or Jeremiah Wright. Or W. Bush's pic with the prince of Saudi Arabia, suspected supporter of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Or Bill and Hillary's connections with the Chinese Govt and their illegal funds.
If you think it's only "the other party" that does "the really bad stuff," then you should not be permitted to vote in November.
Birther are you?
What a whiny little cunt you are. These guys were all taken out by Obama and his cronies.
The board of directors were old white republicans. The hero of the story is george schulz’s grandson and parents who stood up for truth.
Watched it a few months ago and she infuriates me.
Remember folks: don't always trust someone who dropped out of undergrad early to be an "expert" in their field.
Imagine how much time, effort, and money would've been saved if Elizabeth Holmes stuck around to take an analytical chemistry course, learning that guess what: detecting a few molecules of what you're looking for out of the billion billion other junk in a sample is HARD.
" Remember folks: don't always trust someone who dropped out of undergrad early to be an "expert" in their field."
Yeah. That's the exception to the rule. It's like people who look at Eddie Van Halen (who dropped out of music theory in college) and struck it big; everybody thinks they can do that now.
The problem is, Van Halen had a base of musical knowledge that he had inherently developed over years prior to college. He literally skipped school at times to stay home and play the guitar. Not that many people have that much motivation for themselves.
I didn't realize, btw, that Holmes was a Stanford drop-out. Have to wonder what her parents thought of that.
EVH is also a bad example because music is one of the very few things people can just "get". I suspect music theory class wasn't teaching him anything his brain didn't already understand in his own way.
Michael Faraday says hello
The financialization of the economy naturally leads to things like this. So many rich idiots have so much money lying around they can throw it at whatever they want and suffer no consequences from the business failing. Theranos was transparently stupid, but Uber and Airbnb are just as stupid and/or destructive but they keep getting funding.
Uber and Airbnb are not the same thing as Theranos. They have a viable product (or service) that they are currently selling to consumers in the marketplace. We can debate about the value of the companies and whether they will be profitable long term, but they are actual businesses selling actual products. Theranos sold investors on a product that essentially did not exist. It was fraud, pure and simple.
Uber is only viable because of the massive amounts of capital shoveled into it. It's just an app and a worker exploitation scheme.
Airbnb has destroyed the rental market for a lot of working class people in places like the Bay and New Orelans.
Both companies are an example of increased rent-seeking as a sign of economic stagnation and decay.
Theranos exposed a couple of things, but the biggest was this: most of business success at a high level is pure networking. We have spent decades telling people a lie that if they just work real hard and get good grades and come up with a great idea, they too can be the next Steve Jobs, when the reality is they just need to leverage the fact their dad knows a general.
Theranos never made a lick of sense, and the writer who exposed her was motivated to dig by the EXTRAORDINARILY basic idea that "there's no way some college drop out can make high level medical equipment designed to do things she has zero understanding of." This is a thing anyone with an ounce of common sense would realize too, which should also tell you how vacuous and ignorant the american ruling class is.
We could have national high speed rail or a world class health care system, instead we keep taxes artificially low on the "job creator" class so they can throw that money into a taxi cab app that loses billions of dollars a year, dueling "charities" that never solve any problems and blood machines that are literally impossible. Having so much money that literally nothing you do can ever change the material reality of your life turns your brain into smooth mush.
"We have spent decades telling people a lie that if they just work real hard and get good grades and come up with a great idea, they too can be the next Steve Jobs, when the reality is they just need to leverage the fact their dad knows a general. "
Not entirely true. There are people who have made it by working hard, maybe not to the level of a Steve Jobs, but successful people who worked hard and have something to show for it are out there.
But I have a problem with your last paragraph, because it implies the idea that somebody else who makes a lot of money doesn't deserve to have it. Who are we to decide who has made "enough" money? That's a dangerous slope to go down. I don't believe in punishing successful people by stealing their money. That's theft in the name of the common good.
However, the idea of being a "fat cat" businessman who doesn't actually have a work ethic to show for it is legitimate. Here is a good analysis of the Robber Barons of the 19th Century that discusses how crony capitalism (better to call it "corporate socialism") ruined the free market
If you look at taxation as theft, you've already lost the plot on how any of this works.
If you have benefited greatly from society, you owe more back to make sure the society keeps running. A person barely surviving cannot be expected to fund the entirety of society, but the guy who has enough money to buy 75 houses can afford to just have 10.
But for the rest of us, talent is not inheritable. Ability is random. By allowing the wealthy to escape taxes and then pass immeasurable wealth down to the next generation, you create a permanent noble class who have no demonstrable skills or ability and who just keep vacuuming up all the capital while everyone else withers and begins the long march to serfdom. And as Europe proved once the constant wars stopped killing enough nobility to keep a constant supply of new nobles coming into various countries who had to prove they could at least lead an army well, once you allow a permanent overclass that is wealthy without having to do anything, you end up with decayed, rotting countries that cannot perform basic duties of a government.
You can see quickly America is already at this point, because we cannot perform even the basic requirements of a civilized country. Whole portions of America are less than third world and lack the basic resources to do anything. Why? Because people have allowed themselves to be convinced taxing the rich is wrong and they know better what to do with their money and doing anything else is "punishing success."
The reality is, the rich barely know how to tie their own shoes, let alone the most efficient way to allocate their massive resources to keep their country alive.
You don't get it.
The "permanent class" of wealth comes from government interference, not government withdrawal. In a true free market, anybody can ascend to a better income. People do it all the time. I don't know about you, but I have a better standard of living than my parents thanks to hard work. And I can name other people who have done the same. It is government interference that prevents class mobility.
Class envy does nothing to fix this. Punishing people for being successful does not help the poor. That's draconian Marxist propaganda (interesting to note that Karl Marx was a hypocrite when it came to trying to employ his own philosophy: LINK ON MARX'S BIOGRAPHY). It's what gives way to people like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler (yes, Nazi Germany's base was Marxist in form), Pol pot, etc.
And socialism is parasitic. There's a reason why countries like Sweden and Denmark moved their economies AWAY from socialism; they were becoming bankrupt. The Soviet Union, in its final years, was forced to do an occasional "free market period" every few years because the economy was becoming depleted. Even China has softened degrees of its communism and has resorted to more of a State Capitalism, in part because they saw the economic ruin of the U.S.S.R. and realized that full-on socialism wasn't sustainable.
Most countries labeled socialist actually aren't: they're usually a capitalist base with socialist programs. As Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
If you don't like capitalism, go live in a country that doesn't use it. Perhaps you should spend time in a truly socialist country like Venezuela, North Korea, or the former Soviet Union and see what socialism breeds. Because all of those countries lay claim to Marx and Marxist socialism as their base. For that matter, you don't even have to go that far: go to Mexico, where the economy leans socialist, and the value of the peso is far more unstable each day than it ever was in the U.S.
People who look at others who have more as merely targets to punish and pillage are the wet dreams of dictators.
If the Nazis were communists, why did Henry Ford love them so much?
“Whole portions of America are less than third world and lack the basic resources to do anything.”
That’s complete and utter bullshit.
"Crony Capitalism" and "Corporate Socialism" are just rhetorical tricks to get people off the trail. Capitalists dominate the state in every liberal democracy. Capital always accumulates in fewer and fewer hands and naturally those who have capital use it to influence the state.
Socialism is democratic control of economic production. This has nothing to do with corporations using the state to bail them out.
I mean were there ever a truly "Free Market"? I get Ms. Rand's argument that there was no economic case for private companies to build transcontinental railroads. That's why the government had to sweeten the pots to get those railroads going. Did the private companies shy away from the new markets and opportunities that were opened by the railroads? But they didn't right? As soon as the government investment made the opportunity, they jumped in.
This is fascinating actually. In India, most if not all railroads are owned by a single body, supported by the government. Though originally conceived as a means for the British government to ferry cargo, it has grown to serve as a connector for the whole country. The system transports people and freight locally and all over the country. It serves a more social purpose.
In the US as every line is owned by a different company, it's really difficult to set up a seamless system to move cargo and people all over the country. The seamless options in the US are road and air. And realize that private companies don't own the interstate system or air corridors.
This is a funny story. They dressed her up like a female Steve Jobs and people couldn't wait to throw their money at her.
There is no “they”. This was all on her.
And her boyfriend sunny
I'm dying to read Bad Blood, haven't gotten to it yet.
I would argue its not just Silicon Valley culture but also hedge fund, Wall Street and biotech culture that helps create these monsters. Shkreli was like this and tried to put the idea out there that he was a wiz-kid/prodigy. People were starting to believe it before he was exposed as a fraudster. And he's still at it: he's trying to convince a judge to let him out of prison so he can work on a cure for corona - give me a break.
Alan Greenspan was also known for talking himself up at DC cocktail parties for DECADES, hailing himself as a genius. Enough people took his word for it and didn't really pay close attention and next thing you know he's the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Then we found out he was closer to fraud than genius.
Shameless self-promotion will get you a long way in this country.
[PS: to me, the Theranos scandal also revealed another fundamental fact about modern America: losing rich people's money is the only true white collar crime. The only reason any of these financial villains - Madoff, Holmes, Shkreli, etc. - are so well-known is because they took wealthy people's money. If they ripped off regular people, no one would know their name (or they would be working in the treasury department right now).]
You need to get around to reading Bad Blood - Theranos took plenty of money from non-wealthy people with the blood tests that were complete frauds. Not to mention the 'results' that had/could've had disastrous health implications for those people. How she is not in prison, along with a bunch of the corporate cronies she had working for her, still amazes me...
The part that baffles me completely is not the scam, not the hubris, not the smart investors like Buffett who put money into it, but the fake demonstrations that nobody questioned. "Come in and see our facility! Watch our demonstration, see how fast it works! Here, we take a sample, then we all leave the room, close the door, and look the other way. When we come back later it'll be done. No, it's the same device, we promise!" Fucking mental.
One of the investors was asked about Theranos after all of this came to light. His response was that he still believed in the company's vision and thought it would have succeeded if Holmes had been Chief Medical Officer instead of CEO.
People learn nothing.
Some people learn nothing, and some people are just bullshitters to the core -- the actual facts of any matter are beside the point, as everything is just a con that either works or doesn't. I'm not sure who this investor is, but if he's in position to be investing like this, bullshitting has probably served him pretty well in life. The relevant lesson would be that bullshitting works, and should be applied here to a Theranos post mortem.
I think it is REALLY hard for some people to admit that they fucked up. And it's especially hard to do when you have a camera in your face and someone is, effectively, asking you why you were so stupid.
the lack of blinking was also equally creepy