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Comment count is 23
Marlon Brawndo - 2019-03-21

Most successful con artist of all time?

I watched this all the way through. I'd only heard about this a little bit. The details are staggering. Wow. What a fucking sociopath.


casualcollapse - 2019-03-21

Yeah, this video was the first I heard of it, and now it's blowing up online


BHWW - 2019-03-21

Favorite details from the book "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou include all of the activities by the other sleazebags involved in this mess, including COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani who was involved with Theranos and I do mean "involved":

"One of the most surreal incidents involved a burly software engineer named Del Barnwell. Big Del, as people called him, was a former Marine helicopter pilot. Sunny was on his case about not working long-enough hours. He'd gone as far as to review security footage to track Big Del's comings and goings and confronted him in a meeting in his office, claiming the tapes showed he worked only eight hours a day. "I'm going to fix you", Sunny told him, as if Del were a broken toy.

But Big Del didn't want to be fixed. Shortly after the meeting, he emailed his resignation notice to Elizabeth's assistant. He heard nothing back and dutifully worked the last two weeks of his notice period. Then, at four p.m. on a Friday, Big Del picked up his belongings and walked toward the building's exit. Sunny and Elizabeth suddenly came running down the stairs behind him. He couldn't leave without signing a nondisclosure agreement, they said.

Big Del refused. He'd already signed a confidentiality agreement when he was hired and, besides, they'd had two weeks to schedule an exit interview with him. Now he was free to go as he pleased and he damn well intended to. As he pulled out of the parking lot in his yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, Sunny sent a security guard after him to try to to stop him. Big Del ignored the guard and drove off.

Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the office asked what he'd taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, "He stole property in his mind."


Marlon Brawndo - 2019-03-22

The whole weird Indian millionaire boyfriend subplot was just icing on the crazy cake. I would have loved to have been there to see a spoiled millionaire weasel try to intimidate a fucking Marine.


Marlon Brawndo - 2019-03-21

This really needs a "sociopath" tag.


jangbones - 2019-03-21

"crazy eyes"
"fake voice"


Old_Zircon - 2019-03-21

I knew a guy who did the fake voice thing, years before we were friends he had deliberately taught himself to speak with a lower voice all the time to "get respect."

It's the biggest red flag.


Scrimmjob - 2019-03-22

I work with a fella who has this really weird affected low voice, it seems like something he may have started doing in high school, and he might not be able to stop. It's like this really fake "woooah man" low stoner voice thing, it's kind of embarrassing.


Old_Zircon - 2019-03-21

Presidential material.


Rafiki - 2019-03-21

"The early days were not glamorous. The office of the new company was in the part of town known for shootings. One day, while in her car, Elizabeth was shot at, with the bullet just narrowly missing her. Despite that, she received a one million dollar seed investment..."


...but....those 2 things aren't related...


"She started her own company and within days found herself with moldy bread on her kitchen counter. Despite that, she secured a large investment..."


Mister Yuck - 2019-03-21

I'm about 99% sure that story is entirely made up.


Callamon - 2019-03-21

I believe she has a filthy kitchen full of rotting food.


Marlon Brawndo - 2019-03-22

"She started her own company and within days found herself with a dildo modeled after Ayn Rand's secret penis. Despite that, she secured a large investment..."


BHWW - 2019-03-21

Another tragi-comic point of this saga is that Homes asked a Stanford medical professor about the technology before she'd even dropped out of school. The prof told her it wouldn't work and listed out the reasons that would indeed cause it not to work in the future. Holmes ignored her and dropped out to start her company.

A "favorite" line that cropped up in a lot of the fawning press coverage and even in some pieces written after the deception was revealed was that she had "invented the brilliant idea of running a full spectrum of tests using a single drop of blood!" It's not a brilliant idea, it would only be a brilliant idea if she had come up with a way to do it but "brilliant ideas" don't mean anything if you don't have an idea how to accomplish them. I could easily announce I had an idea for a car that can run for 100 miles on a scoop of ice cream, or a full size vaccum cleaner you can fold up into your pocket and never needs to be changed out but I'd have no idea how to make them come to fruition. There is nothing smart about coming up with unworkable ideas.

I think she started believing her own B.S. and cargo-cult assembly of a company that had all the trappings of a successful Silicon Valley enterprise, she just thought that somehow the people at Theranos were just going to make it all work. Somehow. And once they did, she was going to take all the credit for herself. I don't think the plan was to run the scam for decades, with Siemans machines in the basement. Holmes' big miscalculation was that many of the great fortunes in Silicon Valley have been made in software and related services. These are pretty straightforward engineering problems which are amenable to blunt-force application of time and money to solve.

The problems in the field of bio-technology, are often vastly more intractable, and have a radically higher failure rate at the present state of the art. It's a brutal industry. It has been noted that someone tried to tell Holmes this inconvenient fact. It really speaks to the hubris and delusion that she chose the HARDEST category of problem to work on, without barely a sliver of the technical background needed to assess its viability.

Holmes set an impossible goal for her engineers at the outset, then spent the next several years hobnobbing with investors and buying extravagant gifts for herself. Software gets tripped up more often than by promising extravagant features that take years to develop but are still typically plausible. She probably thought medical tech would be just as easy to do that with.


Mister Yuck - 2019-03-21

Honestly, I blame her less than the board. She's a nineteen year old dropout who was handed hundreds of millions of dollars to do something she obviously couldn't do. It looks like she earnestly tried to do it by copying the things she read successful tech CEOs do-namely bullshitting everyone and bullying engineers. That it took ten years to see through this obvious scam shows how completely, pants-shittingly, dick-trippingly incompetent our ruling class is. I mean, I pegged this lady the moment I became aware of her solely on her turtleneck.


Mister Yuck - 2019-03-21

I'm disappointed that the board isn't facing criminal negligence charges. My dad the MBA always taught me that a board of directors has responsibilities beyond sitting back and letting the money roll in. He even had an acquaintance at an A/V company with cooked books that got in trouble even though he probably wasn't involved with the cooking. I guess consequences only happen to small timers.

This company could have been brought down in a day by the chairman taking a walk to the lab and saying, "Okay, show me what you're working on."


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2019-03-21

Seems like they just scammed a load of gormless investors... So not a very serious crime imo.


casualcollapse - 2019-03-22

You can't empathize? ðŸ˜


exy - 2019-03-22

Some of us were in the back of the line the day they were handing out gorm.


exy - 2019-03-22

excellent vid, btw


SolRo - 2019-03-22

‘Silicon Valley's Greatest Disaster’ is just sequel-baiting


spikestoyiu - 2019-03-22

I could watch videos of her doing the crazy eyes and fake deep voice thing all day.


The Mothership - 2020-06-19

She needs to go to jail.


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