Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud

https://www.axios.com/2022/11/18/elizabeth-holmes-fraud-trial-prison-sentence

by FireBeyond • 4 years ago

110 75 4 years ago

axios.com

briandear• 4 years ago

Good. She was a psychopath.

jonny_eh2• 4 years ago

Still is I assume.

shippintoboston• 4 years ago

Was? She popped out to kids in the hopes she’d get off easy.

thefaux3• 4 years ago

Scapegoating 101.

thefaux3• 4 years ago

Just because her behavior was horrible doesn't mean she isn't a scapegoat.

rsynnott2• 4 years ago

Hold on, a scapegoat for _who_?

bpodgursky• 4 years ago

The part that sort of gets me here is that given that she wasn’t convicted of patient harm (questionable, but that’s the verdict), I don’t have any real interest in sending her to prison for defrauding investors. The investors were wealthy morons who invested with 0 research on the technical feasibility of the company. They deserved what they got. Do some due diligence next time.

A_D_E_P_T• 4 years ago

11 years for defrauding "investors" who literally hoodwinked themselves and couldn't bother to do basic due diligence is egregious.

thefaux3• 4 years ago

Hoodwink the entire public and nearly bring down the entire financial system, get a government bailout. Hoodwink a few rich investors, go to jail. Both at taxpayer expense.

foolfoolz• 4 years ago

white collar crime isn’t crime

jdthedisciple2• 4 years ago

That's not how law and justice work.

"The home owner has been a prick to his neighbours anyway, the guy who robbed him shouldn't have been sent to prison"

ShivShankaran• 4 years ago

That's what I don't get about this case. It looks like she ticked off few politicians.

Playing with investors money is literally abc of startups.

I don't understand this case at all

causality0• 4 years ago

Defrauding rich people is much more legally dangerous than murdering poor people through deliberate negligence.

mrlonglong• 4 years ago

I can't believe she tried to get out of it by having babies. I feel for her kids, it's going to be really shit for them.

joshlemer2• 4 years ago

Isn't there a less cynical explanation, that she wanted to have children and, facing the prospect of over a decade in prison, that this was her last opportunity to have them?

bergenty2• 4 years ago

That’s incredibly selfish on her part if that’s the case.

layer83• 4 years ago

That’d be barely better, because the children would still suffer.

idop2• 4 years ago

So she knew she was going to prison, and decided to bring kids in to the world to grow up without a mother? That's even worse.

Edit: typo

metadat• 4 years ago

She could've had kids anytime, especially over the past 7 years. Looking at it now, it's hard to see it as anything but a manipulative attempt to delay the trial (and the strategy succeeded in buying her 3 months) and seek a more sympathetic sentence.

Getting pregnant at age 40 isn't easy, especially twice in less than two years. Highly likely both were IVF induced, the timing was just too perfect.

ProAm• 4 years ago

Looks like the second plan she didn't really think all the way through...

ziroshima• 4 years ago

Good point. There's always a lot of self-righteous judgment with these sort of things. Not trying to necessarily defend Ms. Holmes, but the objective reality is that no one knows her motivations.

samwillis• 4 years ago

That is one way to frame it, the other is that if she suspected that she was going to be going to prison for 10+ years she would be 48 on release and unlikely to be able to start a family. Dispite being a criminal, she is a human with human instincts and may have just wanted to actually have children?

That's not to say that having children just before going to prison for 10 years isn't cruel to those babies.

People are complex and often very flawed.

Edit:

To add, I have no sympathy for her, but the thought of being disconnected from my children for 10 years fills me with such fear that I imagine she has made her sentence even more torturous than it would have been.

autotune• 4 years ago

If her kids don't end up resenting her for being absent for 10+ years, they will when they grow up enough to learn about everything she did.

benmmurphy• 4 years ago

I would rather have a prison mommy than not existed.

shaburn3• 4 years ago

Seems oddly tragic.

kjs34• 4 years ago

Consequences are tragic? Certainly Holmes thinks so...

yunwal• 4 years ago

???

s1artibartfast4• 4 years ago

Indeed. The whole story is tragic and sad. What a waste of talent, money, and time. Not to mention the kids.

Of course she should still be accountable, but people get so caught up in the anger and vengeance aspect that they forget it is also sad.

The whole situation is regrettable and it would be better if it never happened.

shaburn3• 4 years ago

Seems like she could have made a few right turns down a longer path and been a game changer. Obviously much of the tech seemed...wanting. The ability to enlist such powerful people in such an important mission was power gone to waste. At least she didn't waste it driving clicks.

lordfrito3• 4 years ago

Have we forgotten about the fact that Theranos had to void two years of blood test results? People were eventually going to get hurt by this lie. There were real crimes committed here, with real consequences for the perpetrators. It sucks for her children that their mother was found guilty of her crimes, that's no ones fault but her own.

s1artibartfast4• 4 years ago

They said it was a tragedy, not that it wasn't her fault.

gopled• 4 years ago

It seems odd to me how she's being punished so much for defrauding investors, but not for endangering patients with fraudulent blood tests.

Is the latter just easier to prosecute because of the paper trail? Or is the law biased more towards punishing financial crimes?

datalopers• 4 years ago

Theranos raised $1B; FTX raised $2B. So we can assume that SBF gets 22yrs prison right?

jdthedisciple2• 4 years ago

Nope, probably much more since he isn't a female.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentencing_disparity

quantified• 4 years ago

I'd triangulate between Holmes and Madoff.

pxue• 4 years ago

there's clear case of defrauding investors AND creditors. that's more than $2B + $8B disappeared into the void.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

I thought they contracted that out to companies that did real blood testing.

johndhi2• 4 years ago

because the prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests, and the testing agreements probably got the patients to agree if it didn't work they wouldn't rely on it.

kjs34• 4 years ago

prosecutors don't have good evidence of anyone actually harmed by the bad tests

I think it's more nuanced than that. Even if the prosecutors had mountains of evidence of harm to patients, defense attorneys have a lot of experience casting doubt on that kind of evidence making trail very tricky. My wife works in the medical/legal overlap and constantly sees stuff like "yes the patient spent 30 years working in an asbestos plant next to an industrial incinerator, but they smoked a cigarette once in the bathroom in high school so you can't say their cancer came from any one cause". And sometimes juries buy it.

But when you accumulate mountains of evidence that basically says "yeah, we know our stuff doesn't work...fake it till you make it, yo", you've got counterarguments like "we were just kidding" and "it's all fake" that isn't as resonate with the jury. So, the prosecution goes with the high-confidence charges.

tekla• 4 years ago

Financial crimes are easier to prove. Same reason Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion.

kjs34• 4 years ago

Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. She got convicted for fraud because it was easy to prosecute, she got sentenced at least partially for cynically endangering peoples lives. There's clearly an argument that this is an abuse of the legal system, but she's not being singled out here.

_skel• 4 years ago

People don't get convicted for doing bad things. They get convicted for breaking specific laws. In this case, the laws against defrauding investors were clearly broken, to the extent that a jury unanimously agreed they were broken. Whatever laws might have applied to the patients did not meet that bar.

I keep seeing a lot of "throw them in jail" posts here on HN and it's bad. It should be very hard for the state to jail someone. It should require extremely solid proof that they committed a crime which was defined in law. If we lose that principle, we revert from rule of law to rule of judges and mob rule. Some people like Holmes don't get punished in a way that satisfies everyone they hurt, and people like SBF might never get punished, and that's fine because lowering the burden of proof would only result in more injustice.

GMoromisato• 4 years ago

I think you're just throwing the trolley switch differently from me.

deepspace• 4 years ago

The fact that the law punishes defrauding investors, but not defrauding patients or employees, just shows that those laws are written by rich people, for rich people.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Good, I feel bad for Balwani for getting caught up in her mess.

tyingq• 4 years ago

Federal time also, so she will serve most of it. They offer 54 days credit per year for good behavior, which is much smaller than what you often see for state vs federal sentences.

SevenNation• 4 years ago

Holmes in January was found guilty of four charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Wikipedia has this short lay description of wire fraud:

In layman's terms, anyone trying to scam other people or groups through any form of communication (paradoxically, even wireless) e.g., phones, instant messaging, email, or through writing, signs, pictures or sounds can be punished with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the scam involves a financial institution, the maximum fine is raised to 1 million US dollars and prison sentence not more than 30 years, or both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Wire_fraud

It sounds like the FTX crew might be facing similar charges at some point.

johndhi2• 4 years ago

Very sad for anyone to go to prison in this country, which nearly never provides any healing or help.

bostonsre2• 4 years ago

It's mainly a punishment and deterrent here. As a society I think we are better off trying to stop other people from doing a similar crime than trying to rehabilitate her.

bena• 4 years ago

"Little has been said about the innovation Elizabeth strived for"

What the hell is this quote? "Yeah, she defrauded people and lied to her customers, but guys, she really, really, really wanted it to work".

We might be talking about her striving if she had tried and failed. If she had tried and came close. But, no, that's not what happened. She claimed she did something she didn't, then took a lot of others' people money to build a business upon that lie.

So, no, we won't be talking about her "vision" or whatever.

daveevad• 4 years ago

At least one strange aspect of her biography that has always stood out to me is:

During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.

That seems extremely suspicious and unlikely but I would love to learn more about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes#cite_note-Rog...

layer83• 4 years ago

At the time, C++ compilers costing money was normal (Microsoft, Borland), and those were physical products (CD-ROMs, printed manuals), so it seems semi-plausible she could have acted as an intermediary with the help of her parents.

djaouen2• 4 years ago

I was in high school around the same time as Holmes and recall using g++ as our compiler. This was on Linux, though.

kjs34• 4 years ago

My experience with Chinese universities was that they had their own ecosystem to "obtain" Western software. They didn't need an intermediary.

djaouen2• 4 years ago

Might be true because Holmes has a pathological stupidity.

rsynnott2• 4 years ago

Yeah, was trying to find out more about that before, couldn't find anything. Now, the journalist wrote a followup about how he'd been mislead, and maybe that was part of the misinformation... but if it was it was a deeply weird thing to make up. Holmes is about the same age as me, and when I was in high school there were definitely free C++ compilers, even for Windows (I vaguely remember messing around with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJGPP, and Borland also had a shareware C++ compiler...)

codex_irl• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what happened to all of the Theranos hardware / technology after the company was shut down? e.g. the edison testing machines

rheffern• 4 years ago

I'll hop on here in a vain hope too.

I want to buy a Theranos Edison machine and am willing to pay. If you know anyone that has one, parts of one, or anything like that, my email is in my bio and I am very happy to talk to you.

I intend to take a small portion of it, melt it into steel ingots, and include it in 'Order of the Engineer' rings for myself and my colleagues who are also engineers.

We are looking for physical equipment in which engineers screwed up and the general public paid a high price for it, as a reminder to ourselves that our work is meaningful and is one of service to the people we serve with our efforts. If you know of any equipment that may fit that bill, I am looking to pay for that too.

chihuahua• 4 years ago

John Carreyrou's book about Theranos is absolutely riveting, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something suspenseful to read.

lessname• 4 years ago

I wonder if she did make any profits out of Theranos or was it all for nothing?

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud

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