Why Elizabeth Holmes Was Convicted (and Also Acquitted)
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- čas přidán 19. 01. 2022
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Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was convicted on some charges but no others. Why?
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@@mozolejos goo on
4th
Thunderf00t criticizes Elon Must a lot from a science perspective. Is there anything you can talk about Must from the legal perspective?
So the CEO of *T* *h* er *a* *n* *o* s* has been convicted...in a snap 👌
I want to know exactly what happens by law if you defy a congressional subpoena.
It’s wild that the person known for being adept at manipulation absolutely did the exact same thing to the jurors and it totally worked.
People don’t wanna believe they’re being conned
She'll still have a major felony conviction on her record, many years in a federal prison and irreparable damage to her reputation. No wonder she married William Evans, a 29-year-old heir to the Evans Hotel Group, who would hire her after this? But if you consider that to be successful manipulation...okay then.
@Don Miller who needs to get hired after you scamed 100+ million? Further she will get 15 years at most she will charm the sentencing same way she charmed the jury
White girl magic.
You aren't good at manipulation if you can't manipulate people who already know you are going to try.
Elizabeth Holmes is punished for making fools of rich investors but is acquitted for causing real harm to patients.
Yup. The jury got that wrong
@@islesofshoals3551 again just fork yourself, dingbats, total dingbats.
You can sell quackery to the riff raff, but don't dare pick a rich man's pocket.
Seems legit. The fraud (“Justice”) system working as intended
Prosecutors dropped the ball.
Juror #6: "She seemed so nice, so I couldn't convict."
Juror #6, that's what a con artist does. That's why "con" is short for CONFIDENCE.
The takeaway: you can get away with fraud if you're a good enough con-man to convince a jury that you really believed you weren't doing anything wrong.
Seems like a pretty big loophole to me.
Yep, It shows that the jury did not analyse the actual facts of what she did and instead based their verdict on emotion
It's actually been the largest criticism of the American legal system pretty much since it's inception. That a jury is too easily swayed by charismatic defendends.
It blows my mind she got away with fraud. She still took their money. The entire idea that, she did it in good faith? What? She still believed in her own creation, that's not a picture of someone who cares. That's a picture of a psychopath who would fake her own voice, commit fraud and get away with it.
Agreed 👍🏻 I was thinking the same thing
While the Judge may be a representative of the law, the Jury are representatives of the people. And people created and bought pet rocks.
"She genuinely believed she was helping people."
No she didn't. She might genuinely believe she COULD EVENTUALLY help people, but if you knowingly lie about WHETHER OR NOT YOU USED YOUR OWN TESTS you probably don't genuinely believe your tests CURRENTLY help anyone.
Great point.
Yes! If someone drops out of college as a Freshmen and then sets up a hospital claiming to be a neurosurgeon because they do want to one day *eventually* qualify as a neurosurgeon that doesn't make them any more qualified or their victims any less dead!
I take this one step further. She's a highly functional Psychopath and extreme narcissist. I believe that she believes she's the smartest person in the world and that all her problems are caused by the stupidity of others. I believe that she has no problem lying through her teeth, and no shame about what she's saying. If she thought she could get away with it she would probably make up larger lies to draw sympathy for herself, like being the survivor of a terrorist attack or something crazy like that. What makes her incredibly dangerous is that she does have a silver tongue. She can say all the right things to a person and talk them into giving her all of their money while literally stabbing them in the chest and yet people will believe it's somehow their fault for walking into her knife.
Someone that genuinely believe in helping others would NOT obsess with modeling themselves after famous rich people (Steve Jobs) and trying to portray herself in the same vein.
I think what happened ultimately is that she aimed for something she thought she could revolutionize, blood draws, and thought she could arrive at the answer.
And the idea she had would be revolutionary for sure and despite it being for her own self gain, if she actually accomplished it would have been something to improve the lives of virtually everyone.
The problem is that it just isn't possible. There's enough there to make it statistically better than a coin flip, but that's no where near what you actually need to be able to realistically use it in the medical field.
And this is how you can tell she is just a charlatan. Instead of addressing it and maybe moving the goal posts of what they were doing to still make use of what they were doing, she instead double downed on it and just made outrageous lies and used cover-ups to hide the faultiness of her product.
Jim Jones thought he was genuinely helping people as well. And we all see how that turned out.
I'm a former neuroscience lab tech, and I can confirm that EVERYONE in lab science knew this was nonsense from the beginning. But of course no one listened to the actual technicians until far too late during this saga. 🙄
I'm not even a scientist and I thought it was bs from the beginning. You don't get new techniques all at once. Going from a gallon needed for a thousand tests to one vial? It doesn't survive the slightest thought
I’m just confused how she got a directors sit at Harvard medical school
@@carletpierre1895 most likely money
Because technicians are peons. Money gets you power.
The suits like to ignore the eggheads. If the "suits" believed the eggheads actually understood the things they spent years learning and working on, Theranos would have collapsed years and billions of dollars sooner and Elizabeth Holmes wouldn't be going to prison.
Someone can still be “likeable” and guilty …
She really made a fool of the jurors involved …
Ted Bundy was extremely charming. He also wanted to have sex with your dead body, but that's a different story.
Fun fact, that's Holmes's stage voice. She intentionally tried to sound more masculine so her investors would trust her more.
Professor Phyllis Gardener knew Holmes when she was a student at Stanford and says she had a typical young woman's voice at the time. She met her later and was taken aback at the new low one.
Her talking style, all the pauses, would have annoyed me enough to vote no.
Her very intense gaze was also something that really intrigued people and gave her a very unique personality which attracted people. Some thought that was the gaze of a visionary. At least that's what she wanted. Some others might call her gaze creepy, even psychiatric. Because she sure is a narcissistic sociopath, like Martin Shkreli. She certainly does know instinctively how to manipulate people.
@@Flavia1989 - I agree with the sexist part. Her being a woman was the only reason all of the red flags were ignored and everyone were willing to throw money at her, with absolutely nothing to indicate she knew what she was talking about and no verification of anything she said or claimed to do being true. A society desperate - not for a strong, competent scientist - but for a strong, competent FEMALE scientist... One of her primary early investors even said so himself...
Fun Fact: Elizabeth Holmes, Real voice of Darth Vader. 😂😂
As someone who works in a lab, this whole case annoys me to no end. They asked doctors and investors, not pathologists and laboratory staff. Her claims of being able to perform a large battery of tests on a few drops of blood are a pipedream. She annoys the ever loving hell out of me.
Agree, from a retired lab tech. It makes me sick how she defrauded people. I agree that pathologists and lab staff would be the people to ask. You have to admit that her looks enabled her to get as far as she did.
@@demcduff she was actually well connected too, she was able to get former heads of government agencies be on her board and used their names to get those agencies to support them on the word of their former employee who held a high position. So it bwcame pretty easy to get rich people to invest when you can use your board filled with all stars of credible names as selling points too.
Most of the people she got to invest also had no medical knowledge or background, she was very calculating on who to target for her investing pitches too. She was great at selling ideas and concepts, but she was skilled at manipulating people's interests and find the right people to better sell her ideas too.
Unfortunately there are very few people on the planet capable of identifying this as fraud. The kinds of scientists most likely able to hear the BS are most likely molecular biologists or biochemists. To understand just how few and far between these people are there is about 28000 biochemists and 36500 molecular biologists. You might also have some chemical engineers, chemical physicists and a few other subgroups of careers with the ability to understand this stuff. Generally speaking about 0.008% of the population is exposed to the technicalities capable of inferring the absurdity. Most scientists are disagreeable introverts (~76%) so are immediately less likely to even be socially involved and of the few that are most lack connections leaving probably around 3000 to 5000 people in the US alone with the ability and authority to warn people. This is approximately 56% of the world professionals in these fields since the US has the overwhelming largest output of professionals in the field. I work in a lab essentially as technical operations scaling the production and introduction of new proteins for fermentation and purification. I work with people who have access to different CEO's and it might surprise you that even phd's with high level connections and 30 years of experience still have a knowledge base so limited it would slip under the radar.
While people might find this suprising most doctors have very little knowledge about how the various testing machines actually work except at a limited theoretical level. Lab techs often know more then the doctors about the nature of the machines while doctors more or less know the purpose and outputs of a machine. Many doctors will be far to specialized in a specific field to identify inconsistencies with a theory and the nature of the machines used for diagnosis. It's the minority of doctors who are that level of detail. PHD's in the field of test kit manufacturing and protein chemistry are the most likely to notice the inconsistencies.
@@ajmaynard92 You don't have to have a PhD in the field of "test kit manufacturing" (whatever that is supposed to be) to know this was bogus. Anyone who knows anything at all about lab assays would know this was way beyond what could be done. Or anything at all about drug/medical device development. As is the case with all successful scam artists, their victims are mostly driven by greed. Venture capitalists are used to taking risks. They know that many of their investments don't work out and factor that in. They didn't lose their life savings and won't get a lot of sympathy.
What Dr did they ask? All the Drs I saw interviewed said they were very skeptical and others claiming she didn't know much about medicine. All the Drs I know that were talking about this when she was becoming a big thing all were very skeptical without exception.
Her getting off on defrauding the patients was absolute malarkey. They sold physicians on a product that, even if she genuinely believed would work eventually, she knew it did not work yet. And knew that the end user would be the patients.
That part is a bit tricky since blood tests were actually provided, even though they were of low quality. So not like straight up fraud. Unless the advertisements included provably false claims.
So....why didn't the jury vote guilty on the charge of wire fraud against patients? Do you believe all 12 were uneducated perhaps, or deficient mentally? Not one amongst the 12 had the ability to apply reasoning and logic in their decision making process?
Or maybe, just maybe, other evidence was presented that you weren't privy to, keeping you from knowing the whole story, that influenced their decision?
“Just maybe” isn’t good enough
yeah! and mind you this is technology that was supposed to be used for serious illnesses. Like cancer for example. People make decisions based on their tests. If a health test is inaccurate people might not only be offered lesser treatment or inefficient one but might get over-treated if tests show them their situation is worse than they think. Or might even be treated for illness they don't have, because test is bogus. And this is not like getting a bit more of cough medicine. Treatments for stuff like cancer are serious and take toll on the body. People could/would die. She was putting people, knowingly too, putting people at risk. Like sure, every medicine and treatment and new thing has to be tested but it's done on tests groups and people who get into those tests groups, if the thing is genuine, are told their odds and that it's experimental. They know what they're signing up for. Here? Patients were sure it works.
I think part of the problem was a lack of clarity in defining "material" statements. LegalE makes it sound like the definition covers any statement which could have changed a reasonable person's mind. This would cover the objective lies she told about other companies, and the military, endorsing her blood machine. Under that reading, it wouldn't matter if she believed in the machine itself - although I'm not sure why the jury believed her on this point - because she made other material lies for the ultimate purpose of getting money from patients. (The point of a conspiracy charge, in this non-lawyer's understanding, is to catch people who didn't do the crime in person.) However, I'm not sure if I'm reading the law correctly here, and it likely wasn't clear to the jurors.
This one hit close to home for me. I could have died as a result of a test I got from Theranos while I had a serious health condition.
Extremely unlikely. Doctors always do controls when a lab test indicates a serious problem.
@@Celisar1 if a test indicates no problem at all, you move on and make different tests.
Yeah, you rerun the tests later to see if the values changed as the conditions progress, but this is to see change.
and then you catch a value jumping from typical to pathological - so that value is relevant, but can not be the core root. It has to be a secondary effect.
So, you tread for the worsening blood values, while still hunting the actual cause.
Now imagine that the first test was a false negative.
a) the test will not get repeated because repeating tests increases the false positive rate - thus leading the doctors down the wrong path.
b) the test weeks later will be seen as a worsening, not initial condition - thus leading the doctors down the wrong path again.
My 12 year old daughter actually believes she is helping people when she play doctor. She BELIEVES that her actions are improving the lives of her parents but that doesn't mean I follow her advice and start taking medication for her made up diseases. This is the difference between miss Holmes and her beliefs, she endangered many lives and should be behind bars and banned from playing doctor ever again.
huh? tell me you have very poor theory of mind without just saying it jfc.
Here is the truly crazy thing about the Theranos scandal. Holmes was from Stanford, and the Theranos headquarters is a mile from campus. Yet there is not one physician or scientist here who believed her technology was legit. How investors got played for millions without even talking to an independent scientist, when there were 1000s of local scientists to choose from within spitting distance from Theranos is beyond me. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for someone so wealthy who is that reckless with their wealth.
EDIT: Another comment here mentioned Ian Gibbons as a counterexample. (CZcams is not letting me directly reply the comment) Gibbons was not affiliated with Stanford, and as he worked for Theranos, he was hardly in a position to give investors an independent opinion on the technology.
It was a scam - from the start - just like the Bernie Madoff Scandal, the Mortgage Scandal, the Enron Scandal and thousands of others that the public is oblivious to - the WHO, the IMF, NASA, NOAA, the USGS, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, the FDA ... on and on and on and on... the rigged stock markets - worldwide - the corrupt politicians - worldwide .... the lies printed in schoolbooks and university textbooks, the lies printed in the fake science magazines and in the idiotic peer-reviewed journals that maintain compliance among the unintelligent fake science gods that graduated with their C average from low level institutions with minimal entrance requirements ...
When will the public smarten up - the IQ's of the "scientific community" are online - uploaded by Psychologists who tell us that the 85 to 115 IQ's of geologists are, at best, the intellectual equivalent of the smart kids in fifth and sixth grades, so while the general pubic gets their history of Earth from those with the mind of a child, very few notice the insanity...
The scam, the sham, the farce, the fraud, the intentional disinfo, the epic psy-op extends across politics and economics, across the military forces, military weaponry, advanced technologies, etc., and all across the medical mafia, the fake healthcare and fake nutrition... all across the fake history and fake chemistry... on and on and on while the public is oblivious to the deception ... they love imagining that the billionaires that have siphoned 99% of the world wealth into their control actually cares about them.
What is with this "disconnect": Billions of babies and children suffer and die from malnutrition and curable disease in horrific poverty - worldwide - while the ignorant gullible public clings to their desperate hope that the billionaires have been telling the truth about science and history and politics and economics ...
The public thinks they have democracy and freedom and equality while their television news and television "programming" is dumbing them down as their air, water, food, beverages and medicines are poisoned - but they want to believe in the lies they've been indoctrinated to cling to and defend...
@@WhirledPublishing Are you writing a book?
@@Bijoubix I've been a researcher for over 50 years and a prolific writer for nearly 40 which has resulted in nearly 500 book manuscripts, dozens of screenplays, a dozen musicals, hundreds of original songs, inventions, and architectural designs, including a design for a self-sustaining eco-village, etc.
Since the true timeline for our human history - and the true timeline for the history of our Earth - are documented, by our ancestors, in hundreds of independent historic documents, written in dozens of languages from all across our Earth, and since that timeline is corroborated by thousands of other independent sources, the deception - by the "billionaires" and their minions - is conspicuous. Thank you for asking.
@@WhirledPublishing Excellent, I've subscribed to your channel.
@@Bijoubix Thank you - if you see a video title on my channel that seems interesting, let me know.
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the jury heard that her product was essentially as accurate as a coin flip and yet they still believed she was genuine based on her testimony. That is incredible. Imagine how effective she could have been if she wasn't a fraud.
Basically, they thought she was delusional rather than purely trying to scam people for money, and that her lies and everything else were based on what she thought "could" work even if it didn't work right now. Probably helps that the jury a) probably knows very little about BioTechnology, and b) really, really want this sort of tech to exist as much as her investors did
Because she’s a woman. It’s that simple. Were she a man they would have thrown the book at her. And I suspect they will do just that with her business partner in the upcoming prosecution.
When you’re a conman or conwoman in this case you need to believe the lie
"Imagine how effective she could have been if she wasn't a fraud." - Largely not possible. The traits that make you have those levels of sky-high confidence and charisma are the same ones that lend themselves to the dark traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. When you're knowledgeable but not convincing, that is more normal. She stands out because she's extreme, but it's very rare for someone with these problematic psychological traits to be a force for good. They're nearly always a force for themselves at best and for the destruction of others at worst.
You people make it look like she got off. She's in prison.
fun fact: my mom used to work for her dad in the government. he talked about his “successful” daughter A LOT and pushed the sort of hubris that got her into trouble. yikes!
having listened to The Dropout and reading through Bad Blood now, the twist that she decided to blame Sonny for everything that she did was an absolutely disgusting move. even if there was a case of battered wife syndrome to be had there, all of the issues with the blood test designs had been there since BEFORE Sonny ever became involved with the project. the fact she was acquitted on the case of defrauding patients (which was clearly the case as many had to go get retests) is insane to me, that is people's LIVES on the line, not just their dollars. she surrounded herself with yes-men and ignored or harassed anyone who disagreed with her (which was many people). if she actually cared about doing the right thing, she would have listened. she didn't and that is what makes this case so insanely frustrating.
The issue was what they tried to charge her with and their reasoning. Calling what she did to patients "wire fraud" was a massive mistake. "Honest services fraud" would have been more accurate, but for some reason the prosecution wanted to go for wire fraud. No clue why, but their legal reasoning was weak, IMO. Were I on that jury, I'd probably have found her innocent of that one too. Begrudgingly, mind. But I don't think what she to patients constitutes wire fraud, and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. Fraud, absolutely. But not wire fraud.
Maybe next time a 19 year old with 1 year of undergrad chemistry claims to have invented the 'most disruptive device in the history of medicine' which defies the laws of physics, people will ask more questions before investing...
Don't think it violates the 'laws of physics' though lol. :p
Source: I have a physics undergrad.
@@KabeloMoiloa it does. The only way the machine would ever be able to run properly was if the server admin of the universe turned off the physics for a little bit. (specifically to function properlyit would need to violate to several of the thermodynamic and electro-static laws to actually function the way she was claiming it could work).
Too much generated heat in too tiny of space as well as the sheer number of things that needed testing made it impossible to ever get accurate readings (the edisons couldn't even accurately perform a single test and most of the tests couldn't work at all due to so much electrical interference) AND that's on top of the sample sizes being so diluted that even running them in dedicated 3rd party machines (the ones the theranos was supposed to be replacing) for each step had to run some tests multiple times just to try and verify the results were accurate because of just how bad the sampling was. And some of those were still wrong just because of samples simply not being good enough.
Ha! You optimistic person you. Wherever there are snake oil salesman, there will be customers.
No. And they'll vote again for a Democrat president.
I was directly affected by Theranos so this is interesting to me. My doctor suggested I use Theranos for a blood test because money was tight and my high deductible insurance meant I had to pay most of my health costs out of pocket. I got the test. It seemed impressive with the phone app they had. I was excited. Except the test was completely wrong and I had made health decisions based on the bogus test I received. I kind of wish I could sue Theranos and I suppose I could have tried, but mostly because I was angry that I was duped. I feel like if you get duped by a store selling you something that doesn't work it's different when you are purchasing something that is part of the public trust like health care.
Your doctor was a damn fool. I spent one semester in pharmacy school and could easily see that Theranos' claimed technology was unrealistic compared to current technology. Having spent years in medical school and residency, your doctor should have known this immediately. Shame. I hope you don't don't still see him.
Was there never a class action lawsuit against theranos?
@@richardaversa7128 I mean, she fooled bigger people than his local family doctor... Pretty easy to say all that in hindsight
@@Jose-gc8rl if there was I was never contacted. I never went out looking for it. In general I pretty much forgot about Theranos until it pops up in the news an then I get annoyed again and move on. Maybe I'm just too cynical, but it seems like those class action lawsuits end up paying out very little to each person. I figure if I tried to sue I might be able to get the cost of the test back. I think it was less than $50. I'm not sure what sort of pain and suffering there is for giving someone inaccurate lipid panels that causes them to go out and try to make healthier choices. Probably not a lot of sympathy for the "victim" there.
@@richardaversa7128 do you think doctors do complete deep research on the thousands of things they recommend? They just look whether there were tests showing that it works, there were, just fake
So the person who literally falsified information, used logos of organizations that were not part of her team to lend her credibility, tried to go around the FDA, etc etc etc, got a free pass on most of the charges because the jury "believed" she was genuine? Do they not feel stupid?
One of the main whistleblowers, Tyler Schultz, did a great short telling of his side on audible, called Thicker than Water. It's scary how Elizabeth managed to get entwined in his family
So she changed her entire personality to manipulate investors, going so far as to change her mannerisms voice and looks. Then on the trial she suddenly transforms into this likeable person that all the jurors genuinely "believe in"
Sorry but sounds like she just manipulated them as well. And they fell for it.
"Judge not less ye also be judged"
The Judge: I'M LITERALLY A JUDGE!!
Yeah.. she sounds like a skilled narcissist to me. A person who doesn't give a shit about what's real, just what she can sell.
@@petrograd4068 Elaine Musk, if you will.
and then at trial tries everything and the kitchen sink to further manipulate the court my boyfriend/ceo "abused" me, that card is getting so old when women get in trouble to try and get out of the crime it takes away from real victims of abuse. if she can prove it, then bring the evidence, otherwise she's just full of shiat and trying to get out of being held accountable. odds on them having money tucked away in the caymans for when they get out of jail? lol doubt they will work int he regular workforce even after all this
Agreed
Theranos' disaster speaks less of the persuasiveness of Elizabeth Holmes, but more about the absurdity that is Wall Street Investing. Everything is about fancy marketing words, be it blood-testing, nfts or the metaverse. A group of ultra-wealthy individuals who are so stuck in their little bubble they fail to apply the most basic rigour to anything they do.
“Does this sound like I can make money on it? Ok. Here’s a check.”
Wall Street & Silicon Valley are basically big circlejerks for venture capitalists.
Her father was an executive at Enron, scamming runs in the family.
If only it was only Wall Street investors... But it's not just them, so many people fall for obvious scams because they fail to do basic research.
@@raitoiro it isn't just them but the thing about them is that it's their job and why they carry such a high cost in terms of their compensation. If they're no better than an everyday person then maybe they shouldn't be compensated about the level of an everyday person.
I'm an experienced lawyer. I watch lawyers on CZcams. You are, hands down, the best. You do a remarkable job.
Just like most things. Your only successful if people like you and your good looking. You can be the best lawyer and know everything there is to know about the law but a good looking young lawyer right out of law school who knows nothing could easily charm the jury and all your knowledge means nothing.
Thanks for the video. A couple of things you didn't mention: Holmes got rid of the CFO for Theranos, when he started asking the wrong questions; there was no CFO, for years, afterwards; and part of Holmes's schtick was to lower her voice from the natural alto to a more business-like baritone. She and Suze Orman should get together to form a podcast team on CZcams; whomever happens to be in jail, at that time, can join the one on probation. Who wouldn't tune in for their excellent advice?
This is whats so frustrating about having it all come down to 12 of your peers. Like how Juror 6 said “well she was so likable and had such a positive dream”. YOU ARE NOT THERE TO JUDGE IF SHES LIKABLE! IT DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU THINK SHE HAD A POSITIVE F*CKING DREAM! Its like 90% jurors never actually make a decision strictly on the evidence and if it was a crime, they all just make their decision on if they’re likable or not. The fact that juror even said that and doesn’t see anything wrong with that is mind blowing 🤯
Its scary knowing your life can be in the hands of 12 of your “peers” or the life of someone who hurt you or someone you love because Ill go back to one of my favorite George Carlin quotes... “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that”
i see it the same way tbh. and im not even from united states so... watching this trials i always ask myself who and why ended up being a jury? what are the criteria? because seems like they just pick some random people from the streets or their homes here and there...
@@godzilla928 They literally pick people off the streets, we have mandatory jury duty, you have to take time off of work to do so or be charged your self
Unfortunately George Carlin didn’t know or understand the difference between average and median.
Joke is on him.
@@godzilla928 that is literally how jury duty works. They select a large pool of citizens at random, then they go through the voir dire, where they ask jurors any questions to see if they have a conflict of interest or any other bias. For example, a professor I had was selected for jury duty when he was younger, and during the voir dire he answered a question by going on for half an hour about how unreliable witness testimony can be, and since the lawyer in charge didn’t shut him up (his words, not mine), the judge had to declare the entire jury pool tainted, since they would now be biased against witness testimony.
Unfortunately, the voir dire doesn’t exactly check for “are you a sucker for a rich white blonde girl with a dream?”
@@Celisar1 yeah, but “think of how stupid the median person is” doesn’t really have the same ring to it… 😂
Wild that putting people's lives at risk by misdiagnosing them is less important to the law than ripping off millionaire investors
It's because of the wavers that were signed for those initial tests. They were technically still part of the medical trials, which is pretty bullet proof for lawsuits. So, like Al Capone, they got her on the charges they could rather than the charges that matter.
@@Thehouseoffail oh fr did those cover all the drug store tests and self-ordered ones too?
@@k--music that one I'm less sure of. If the tests were recommended and administered by professionals then yes. But, I'm not sure if they were ever actually sold in stores without being behind the counter of the drug store.
Also it’s easier to prove financial fraud than it is to prove what someone did or did not know. They can create a paper trail proving that she mishandled investments and lied about preliminary tests working, but it’s much harder to prove that she knew the technology wasn’t viable. But All Night Cats’ point is most of the use for sure.
That's the jury's call
As a clinical laboratory scientist, I encountered her fraud in a high level project early in her career. When I exposed it, I was silenced. I elevated my narrative. Later, I worked for a laboratory company where her staff fled to escape her secrecy requirements. Justice is finally served!!!! Unfortunately, she got away with fraud to patients. Shameful!
I think the real danger was giving patients inaccurate results. This flys in the face of her initial premise of helping people get accurate, cheap and speedy results. She could be liable for class action lawsuit by those patients who recieved inaccurate results since she was found guilty of frauding the patients..
Super frustrating that they said she believed in her products and vision and thought she was genuinely helping. Scientists absolutely do not think or work like that. Even if you believe in the dream, the dream cannot and does not materialize nor can be marketed until the data supports it, and to look past that in the name of a plausible long term vision is absolutely fraudulent from a scientific perspective if not a legal one.
It's more that from a business perspective, founders have to maintain optimism to get the runway to eventually succeed.
Without that attitude, very little would get done.
In this case, her style of doing things was generating funding for scientists to try and innovate.
If she hadn't been in the healthcare space, her style of doing things might have succeeded.
Steve Jobs also often made seemingly impossible demands of his team... But that ended up working out in key areas.
@@Leto2ndAtreides sure. Youre allowed to make unrealistic demands on your team, to be optimistic, and to sell your vision. Thats not the problem.
The problem is that you can only sell your vision as exactly that- a vision. You absolutely CANNOT put up a prototype that doesnt achieve everything your vision states and advertise it as such because you really really want it to. Theres no creative side step there, the research was definitive or your tech is not good enough yet. You CANNOT put out a product with false claims and say its in pursuit of investments and achieving a goal.
@@Leto2ndAtreides i will give you god... im a priest... please invest in me pls...
Oh yeah, the entire scientific and engineering world hates her for using that defense.
Always enjoy these breakdowns, so us normal folk can understand.
I like being considered normal. There's so few of us left. You deserve a big virtual hug from a fellow normal person, me.
@@rodgerrodger1839 wat
@@louisp8561 forget it. You never will.
Devon is great but I don’t know if he is better than random people on twitter screaming their uninformed opinions on these matters.
@@agactual2 those are some fine educated folk you talked on Twitter then if you think he's not better than them. Most people I see there just trash each other around for likes.
“In the disease progression process…” it still fathoms me how no one ever called BS on how unclear and vague her ideas/goals were. Even in that Time profile they did on her, I remember the writer describing her explanation “vague” or something like that.
It always amazes me how all those veteran investors didn't think to consult an independent scientist if this was possible.
A good con artist can probably play on investor greed for quite awhile. "If you call them to check this, then these other people will find out. You don't want to give away the advantage of being in on the ground floor, do you? They could have a lot to offer us..."
The jurors found her likeable...and _that's_ how these people continue to con people *a lot longer* than they should. Sad to see the jurors fall head long into it. Makes me question the validity of having regular people decide people's fate and punishment.
Yeah. The judge or a bench of judges should make the decisions.
Nothing about her is likable. Stupid jurors
there's a reason we have the jury of your peers trail but if the average person is stupid and corrupt then a judge can be too. The jury just spreads out the chances of conflicts of interest.
I really think our education system should be retuned to make us better citizens. Better at understanding each other and those around us and the systems we are involved in.
@@SoulDevoured I somewhat agree with you. I also think our educational system needs to be re-tuned to make us better citizens and that the average person is stupid. But in this case, I think it just proves how good Elizabeth Holmes is at deceiving people.
Theranos board once lost faith in her and wanted to remove her. But in a single meeting, she convinced them not only to let her stay but give her more control over the company. She was already being prosecuted when she met her now-husband. He is the heir to a billion-dollar hotel chain who went to MIT and she still convinced him she was a good person. She fooled a lot of people. She is very good at manipulating people.
@@SoulDevoured People who can afford the money and time off to serve on juries are not my peers. I have been called to jury(edited for typo) duty several times. You see who they are, what their biases are, blind spots etc. Elderly people with a junior high education. Stay at home moms who watch too much Dr Oz. People who went straight from their parent's home to the military and immediately believe everything the cops say. Evidence is over their heads. My dad was a CSI for 30 years. I don't pretend to know everything he did, but the average juror knows less. Holmes convinced her jury, the same way she convinced shareholders. She's non threatening and semi pretty.
What I don't get is why Elizabeth Holmes was able to get away with all this fraud even tho she didn't have a functioning prototype that carried out what she wanted. Shouldn't investors want "proof of concept" or something like that?
She's a white woman in America from an affluent family
I think that’s just how cons work. Either you think to ask important questions first and you’re not persuaded, or you get caught up in the excitement and you let your emotions dictate choices.
You should ask that question to elon musk fans
"Smart people" (venture capitalist) are the easiest to fool, because they often think they cant be fooled.
Especially when the one doing the fooling is one of their own.
According to John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who broke the story that destroyed the company, Elizabeth Holmes very carefully avoided any investors that had substantial knowledge about biochemistry, medicine, and biology. Instead, she pursued investors that were famous and big names but were completely new to the biomedical space.
4 out of 11 Charges. One word I have to say: "Injustice! 🙄"
Vetting process for jurors should really be more involved, especially for those high level cases.
Today's Thursday. New episode tonight!
Seems like she got of real easy to me :/
A juror saying the find someone difficult to convict because the accused is "likable" is also a bit concerning...
Yeah, it's basically an admission that they are at risk of not being able to handle the case without bias.
what? that's _exactly_ what you want in a juror, someone self aware enough of their biases to be able to say they found the decision difficult, but who _made_ that difficult decision anyway!
@@grkvlt they didn’t make the decisions very well tho..
@@grkvlt Anybody can make a decision. They literally had to make a choice. The problem is that their bias may have led to them voting to let someone get away with a crime for free.
@@grkvlt yea a juror should be self aware of their bias but also must neglect and seperate their bias to these situations....
The saddest thing about this is that if Holmes had defrauded consumers and not investors, very little would have been done to her. The only reason she will see the bars of a prison cell is because the rich lost money.
Even there, if she had kept things going past a certain momentum, they would have been fine. The medical field is filled with half baked junk products that do not actually work but still turn a hefty profit once they have a certain critical mass. Investors only start caring when the fraud collapses too early.
@@neeneko source: all the mlms
Exactly! She is a dangerous psychopath that shouldn't be running any business.
@@tatiana4050 yep, mlms are a good example. homeopathic stuff is another. some of the big funders of this company already had their hands in other junk medicine.
@@neeneko Testing falls into a different category than supplements though. Supplements are essentially unregulated while diagnostic tests are very tightly regulated. What if a rich person fried their junk with an STI they were told they didn't have? Big uh-oh.
I love your transitions to sponsors at the end of your videos. Thanks for the legal analysis!
This is so well put together, thanks.
There's something weird about the fact that she was essentially acquitted on the other charges because the jurors felt she genuinely believes she's doing the right thing, and the fact that she may receive a lower sentence based on the fact that she's young and has the capacity to change. It's not explicitly a contradiction, but it's weird that the assumptions that "she still believes in this thing" and that "she'll never do it again" are somehow both working in her favor.
In other words, as long as you "think" you are doing the right thing, then it's OK. Why did we have the Nuremberg Trials?
@@stischer47 Right? This whole thing is sickening and mind-blowing.
Don't forget she played the "abuse" card from her partner in crime.
It's alright to defraud patients' test results. Only when you threaten investor profits are there any consequences in our society. :
@@greg5775 Yeah, I don’t exactly understand that part either. While those accusations shouldn’t be taken lightly and investigated, her being a victim of alleged abuse doesn’t mean that she should be allowed to get off scot-free on the charges.
I think the one that got screwed over the most is the consumer, who should get compensated heavy.
Alot of people that get blood tests go there to detect a health issue, sometimes very serious.
Think about a person taking the Theranos blood test and showing inaccurate results, but then taking an actually viable blood vial test later and then that test accurately detects cancer. The time delay could be detrimental to how effective treatment can be, it's easiest to kill cancer at the earliest point than later.
If consumers were harmed by the incorrect blood test or inaccurate results, they could sue the company for private damages. This is a criminal case where Holmes is being tried on behalf of the government. The case determines whether Holmes personally committed a crime, and in which cases. She isn't paying money for damages, as that would be a civil case. This merely decides what the severity of her crimes against the state as a whole are (she wouldn't be paying money to consumers if she was charged with fraud to consumers in this case).
funny you mention the inaccurate results, they frequently diluted their blood samples and almost got a few patients killed because of their inaccuracy. I recall one case where the test failed to detect substances in the blood you'd get from heart issues, and I believe they got a heart attack not long after the inaccurate results, and another case where the patient was repeatedly informed they were at high risk of diabetes even after numerous life changes and then found out after all that they were actually fine and weren't in danger of diabetes
And yet, the severity of her sentence is based on how much money she took from wealthy investors.
Consumers aren't people, they are ATM machines. (ass to mouth)
@@Finn-xw4vn But the SEC found her to have been defrauding Walgreens, so how was she not also defrauding those patients. Who did she think the tests were being run for, the shelves and walls?
Thank you for a really informative video that broke down why the case went the way it did and what exactly the fraud was about! The media was so useless, spending lots of time on superficial stuff or Holmes' claims (distractions) in her defense, or engaging in meta commentary as if we were already experts on the details of what her company was up to.
Here is a perfect example how the case law and juror system completely fails when a charismatic person is allowed to work them until she gets aquitted by a jury reacting on emotions rather than hard, cold facts. Which is also the reason how such a case could happen: a highly charismatic person defrauding others intentionally by talking enough BS convincingly.
Here's an interesting question: why'd they pick wire fraud? The reasoning on that was sketchy, while there's another form of fraud, honest services fraud, that would have been closer to what she did to patients. She knowingly deprived them of honest services. There's no ambiguity about whether or not she had enough direct contact with patients for it to count, or if advertisements really count, or anything. That's what she did. But they charged her with wire fraud. The one where there's actually a debate to be had. Makes me want to put my head through a wall.
It honestly shows you where we are in America that she got off the hook for alleged harm done to customers, but got convicted of harming investors.
EDIT: My point is that the system is designed in such a way that it's much easier for those with more capital to get justice. Not only because they more capital, but because the legal theories and case law that tend to be applied all favor those with more capital.
She was acquitted of defrauding customers. possibly due to the disconnection between her actions and the customers. But that's only because, in our current economic system, for a scam this size, the person behind it all will almost always be closer to the investors (those with more capital), than the customers (those with less capital). While the theory of proximate cause may seem fair on the surface, it fundamentally excuses large contributors to harm as they will often be far enough removed from the effects of their actions.
TL;DR: those with the power to cause the most harm often are part of an apparatus that will shield them from liability by moving them far enough away from the effects of their actions. thus, it's more difficult to hold those in power accountable, which means it's not really a fair system.
She would have gotten off if she had marketed it to investors the same way homeopathy and supplements are too
The poor stealing from the poor is a crime. The poor stealing from the rich is a crime. The rich stealing from the rich is a crime.
It's only not a crime when the rich steal from the poor. That is part and parcel of the system we've built for ourselves.
It's corruption all the way down, and all the way up.
@@GeneralBolas The rich stealing from the poor is just called Capitalism
Investors are literally all that matters. Even if someone died due to a bad diagnosis.
I love how you can get away with crimes if the jury likes you
You can also be found guilty of the jury doesn’t like you even if the evidence is circumstantial at best.
Still beats any other system of court that puts the burden of verdict on even fewer and even less independent individuals. Humans are flawed and no system built upon humans will be perfect.
@@zxbc1 True. But we can and should have the conversation about how it could be better.
@@Jesse__H any ideas on how to make it better then?
@@zxbc1 imagine being judged by non expert mass in high tech case
Great analysis. Thanks!
Great summary of the story. Off-topic comment but that tie is sick! I relate to Devin's fashion sense.
Dudes will give millions to a biotech company with no product and then vote against medicare for all lmao. I cant say my heart bleeds for these poor investors. However the people receiving false results is ABSOLUTLEY a crime.
That machine was still able to reliably detect herpes, though.
This though. I don't understand why there's need to gamble on the promise of a revolutionised blood testing when fixing the system we already have will have a more reliable result
@@alirodina it's because they won't get any revenue for fixing the system. It's a prime example of capitalist greed
Oddly it's crazy that she can get off the hook for that by essentially acting crazy. It's some kind of strange insanity plea variation. I don't care if someone stabbing a person believes wholeheartedly they're saving the world from a future Hitler or something, the act is still horrific.
@@alirodina because that doesn't have the potential to give them a direct 1000% return on investment.
If less people suffered from preventable conditions that would benefit them indirectly (better workers, more robust economy) but then they might have to actually work and can't point to a graph to show what a great job they did.
Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer, I am even more mad at how much money she wasted that could've been put into legitimate medical research and development.
The amount of fraud and waste in the US medical industry at large beggars belief.
Well, whether the money is wasted on medical research, or money is wasted on military expenditure, what's the difference? Fraudsters will pick any field to make a quick hustle.
And even if investors didn't invest in fraudulent blood testing, that doesn't mean they would've invested that same amount into cancer research. They only invested in blood testing because they thought they were getting in early on a billion dollar business.
To be fair, this is not that big of amount of money, when it comes to medical corporations R&D. It is only a lot of moneyin terms of a summ that could be spent on someone personal health issues. It is still annoying that there isn't same amount of money just being put in the charities from the same investors =\
It would have never been put into medical research and development anyways.
@@renim2974 If theranos was a legitimate startup, then it for a fact would have been put into research and development (not all, obviously). Their entire business was advertising a massive innovation for blood testing hardware that doesn't yet exist. So the entire point of needing investors is so you can kick off that development, and provide the product that was the entire purpose of the business.
The only way to develop innovations is to work at a loss until the technology is up to speed, in which case you price appropriately to make back the losses absorbed, plus costs of material, plus some profit margin.
I work in quality control/ quality assurance and sadly it’s nothing new that our warnings get ignored for the sake of profit… and when something goes wrong we get blamed … I still love my job
QC here too... and yes and yes.
Thank you for covering this trial.
It really matters.
My husband is a pathologist at our local hospital, and he just finds the whole Theranos thing laughable. Blood tests and the machines that run them are such sensitive things, you physically cannot do them with less blood than is required as it will mess with the results. It is so wild to me that NO ONE thought to look into this even a little bit. She may have had positive goals, but by refusing to admit the machine wasn't working, people were misled and potentially hurt, that negates that.
I agree! Can't believe it took so long for someone to detect this. She took major efforts to threaten, control & manipulate everyone around her. She needs to be in a mental institution.
I wonder if she would have been acquitted on a lot of these charges if she wasn't a pretty, young, white woman. The halo effect is reeeally strong with this one, and a jury is plenty susceptible enough to believe that she "really believed in her dream," and want to believe the best intentions from her as a result.
iT hAS nOtHiNg tO dO wItH hEr BeInG wHiTe, ThATs RaCiSt.
But notice how rarely anyone will say that the "because she's a woman" bit is sexist. It goes to show you the demographic of people who pretend that the color of your skin has no effect on anything and the entire world is puppies and rainbows equally for all people.
This is blatant fraud from top to bottom but the jury didn't look at just facts. Ridiculous is the state of this justice system.
@@wh4070 they prolly found jurors who they knew wld be sympathetic to a white woman, most people in the us are anyway since white women like to pretend they r always victims
I was thinking the same! Being young and white really helped her
It extends past juries. Compare the attention cases involving missing white (and attractive) women receive versus cases involving missing men and/or minorities.
If you have time, would you do a video breakdown of the legal situations and laws broken in The Incredibles? I think that would be a lot of fun!
Awesome story and legal stuff :3
Fun Fact: Holmes's father was one of the top executives at Enron. Yes really.
Yep. The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.
Oh, wow, well, there you go.
Jeff Goldblum is saying "there it is" in my mind's eye right now.
@@randyc8771
"Greed finds a way..."
Her fake deep voice is just creepy!
"well I lied to everyone to get my product sold which would have made me a large fortune, I knew it didn't work and that it not working could seriously harm people...
...but I only wanted to help, honest!"
"Well how can we convict such a nice person?"
Hey LegalEagle!
One of the best channels to come out of CZcams
I worked at LabCorp in their testing facility in San Diego and it was horrific. The workers were so overworked that lots of mistakes with the lab tests. We worked 12 to 14 hours overnight, had very poor training, and were required to work at an incredibly fast pace and we had to throw vials of blood into bins when sorting them and there were plenty of times when the vials broke. Being forced to work at such a fast pace, I don't think test results at LabCorp could be trusted. It makes me sad that there is a real need to improve clinical testing and yet so much money was thrown away on this.
so glad I work as a lab tech in germany we have a 3 year long training with exams and finals, we are also severly understaffed tho
The jury finding it hard to convict her because she was so likable is why I welcome our robot overlords.
Jurors: The defendant definitely conned those investors, and lied to them continuously.
Also Jurors: The defendant seems so likable and genuine, I believe the things this known liar is saying to us. Definitely didn't defraud consumers because she said she thought she was helping them.
Me, were I on the jury: *slams head into desk repeatedly because the prosecution picked the wrong form of fraud to try her with*
Seriously, I couldn't have found her guilty of wire fraud on patients. Fraud, yes. But honest services fraud, while far less common and well known than wire fraud, was closer to what she actually committed. Not wire fraud. Pisses me off to no end, but I couldn't have found her guilty of those counts. The shoe doesn't fit.
Brilliant video.
Wow, she played literally every card she could during the trial. I’m honestly impressed
Was she able to afford high priced lawyers? If so, that might have something to do with it.
That's what sociopaths do. She had a baby for sympathy ffs. She will do AYTHING to benefit herself, she is a massive narcissist too.
@@function0077 She charmed the jury all on her own, lawyers can't manufacture charisma like that in others.
What about the chewbacca defense?
@@yourinnerlawyer4035 its not charisma, its whiteness. its easy to see through her and her lies.
As a scientist that completed undergrad, spent time in the pharmaceutical industry and completed a PhD in cell biology, I always felt Theranos claims were suspicious from the beginning. It's not like it was even close to ready, it wouldn't matter if they had 6 more months or 6 more decades. Given the miniscule sample volume it's simply impossible to do what they claimed. Genuinely defies physics and chemistry. You could totally do 1 or 2, maybe up to 10 assays from 500ul of blood. But dozens? Hundreds? Laughable. If you know anything at all about automated liquid handling systems, chemical and immuno assays, and available detection methodologies for these, all of the different reagents required to make the tests work, etc, you'd realize how ridiculous it was. There is physically not enough molecules present to be detected with accuracy and specificity. That's before any loses due to liquid handling, removing red blood cells, etc. When companies like Walgreens signed on, were there any actual scientists in the room?
I was just a computer science major who has taken a biology class, it seems like so many of those biological tests you add chemicals, i.e. of a destructive nature, seemed odd
were there any actual scientists in the room?
Maybe, Probably not
As a non expert i think it's easy to be convinced "maybe science just advanced"
Or rather it's easy if you are one with carisma and mastery of communication,which she seems to have.
The decision makers were most likely not biologist/chemist and these meetings most likely aren't structured like a scientific analysis.
It's not a problem in itself they probably should have asked experts to ask the good questions. But that's hindsight 20/20
I was a med tech working in a hospital lab during this time, doing the very tests they claimed they could do. I, like you, was very suspect of their claims, I could not see a physical way that they could do those tests on that volume with any sort of accuracy, the statistics just don't work out. Additionally, there is a very big difference between the quality of a sample from a fingerstick and one from a peripheral draw. There are many tests that simply cannot be run against a fingerstick sample, no matter the volume, because of "tissue juice" contamination.
Bold of you to assume there are technical individuals present when rich asses cracking open their thousands dollar champagne and talking about how they would make shit tons of money from this.
You should watch the short film, "the expert" (I think that's what it is called I could be remembering wrong). I work in a technical field and the amount of control that bs marketing speak idiots get to have over technical decisions they have no knowledge of (specifically in a corporate environment) is frankly staggering.
Excellent overview, you should do the same with the Dr Christopher Dunstch case
I love how, according to what I heard in this video, the prosecutors put way more effort into proving the charges about defrauding the investors instead of the patients. Gee I wonder if it had anything to do with a bunch of very pissed off rich people getting priority over everyone else?
They picked the wrong charge. What she did to patients was clearly honest services fraud (which is a thing). Wire fraud's a stretch. Pretty self-evident she did that to investors, but not so much to patients. I don't know if that's just prosecutors not knowing the various flavors of fraud well enough, or if that would involve a different trial, or what. But it was the wrong choice of crime.
It says a lot about our society that a person was able to pull all this off simply because she acted a certain way. We live in a society that values who you are, 1000 times more than what you are able to produce
Unless you are a worker in which case they value neither properly
Humans are animals and like all animals plumage counts. Every animal finding a mate has a way to buff himself up. She did the same with money.
No, we live in a society that values who you appear to be and what profit you claim to bring those who back you, rather than who you truly are based on your actual actions, and what good you produce that isn't valued in dollars.
@MrShanester
“…that values who you are…”.
Seriously?
Then Holmes should have been valued as the tacky, little chancer that she is.
It wasn't about how she acted, that's hindsight, and what's now associated with in retrospect. She was so huge because everyone wanted her to be the next Steve Jobs, they wanted to champion a women as a self made billionaire who was also smart; and with a science based company. She checked all the boxes of who the media wanted to back and support; she was on the cover of tons of magazines and new outlets for this reason more than her personality.
I’m a lab tech in a hospital and this whole situation was horrifying and deeply disappointing
Can you elaborate? Was it because it was too far fetched? Or the hope that it could have worked?
@@gravisan Its too far fetched as Chemical and biological tests need different methods that can't be applied to just one Machine.
Not to mention anyone with a basic knowledge of Medical/Laboratory Technology would know its fake.
Really? Do you think Elizabeth will ever be trusted again?
It was when they started fudging the STIs results 😒
Look on the brightside: She made black suit pants / pantsuits look good. Maybe more women will wear them now?
Just an opinion but skirts aren't as sexy.
It's interesting to hear your talk about the jury's rating of witnesses and so forth. In England, jurors aren't allowed to talk about their deliberations outside of the deliberation itself. All they are allowed to say is "guilty" or "not guilty" and how many jurors agreed with the majority. This ban is so comprehensive that even differences in sentence based on points of fact have to be determined solely by the judge, even though it's the jury who is theoretically the finder of fact.
Love the channel, quick question, what is the most affordable way to get a legal library that is like yours?
Stealing one is the most affordable way by far.
It's sad, that she basicly only gets chared for taking money, not for damaging people...
She didn't damage any people.
@@alphanerd7221 If you have thousands of people trusting in her test results for their medial treatment geting wrong results,than that results in people not geting treated right,so geting damaged or die.
14:29 The procecution needed to show intent to defraud patients??
She ordered her lab to dilute blood samples. Yes, her bogus claims of only neededing a "nano-tainer" of blood bit her in the behind. With such small samples the myriad tests she claimed were possible that used reagent chemistry that fundamentally destroyed the sample left her labs inoperable. She needed to dilute it or tell the truth of needing larger samples. What did her labs dilute it with? Who knows? Tap water, saline, alcohol your guess is as good as any.
Any LVN or RN who has drawn blood for lab work will know how egregious this action is. Lab samples must be as pure as possible and sterile or the whole test is false and must be trashed.
Seeing as these diagnosis are critical to life preserving medical choices and the need to dilute was one born of holmes' false claims and dedication to maintaining a facade of only needing a low sample size, how could any court with a modicum of medical knowledge not see this as deliberate, malicious, intent to commit fraud?
Criminal charges stand on two legs: 1. Actus Reus=Guilty Act (criminal act) and 2. Mens Rea=guilty mind= criminal intent. If the prosecution fail to convince the jury of both legs, the person cannot be found guilty of the crime. Moreover, the bar is set even higher in criminal law by the burden proof. The jury must be sure "beyond reasonable doubt" that the defendant had done the act and intended to do it. If there is any doubt on either leg based on the evidence then they must not convict. The prosecution failed to remove any reasonable doubt on defrauding consumers. That was down to their strategy in how they provided evidence to the jury. But she's still going to jail for a long time, and her child will not have her mother to raise her or provide for her care. So, we are where we are.
Medical knowledge is not a given in a jury of one's peers. It is upto the prosecution to provide the evidence in a way that the jury understands. To you it's obvious, but to someone off the street it isn't.
@@BigHenFor Exactly. The education in many English-speaking countries is... troubling, to say the least. People think that "guilty"="did it" when that isn't what it means at all in most cases.
I actually watched the documentary "The Inventor" about Holmes in my high school film class less than a month ago so this is cool to see!
The Cold Fusion YT channel covers the Theranos scandal in several videos very well. Worth a watch.
Her interview on TedTalk is the first time I every heard her voice. Not what I was expecting.
from what i’ve heard, that voice was faked too.
I think Ted talk is fraud too
@@mimijester yes you're correct - her natural voice is higher pitched. She was told that a deeper voice had more credibility
@@Annie1962 yeah, the VC space is historically pretty hostile to women, so there are a bunch of 'so, how can a woman seem more credible to a bunch of guys who think only men make good CEOs?', with lowering your voice being a common suggestion.
I find it hilarious. Also it reminds me that wealthy people aren't any smarter than anyone else
I'm always surprised there are fines in these situations, as opposed to bankruptcy-level seizure of assets. Feels like there should be some laws to prevent profiting from illegal activity...
This guy is Excellenté, very informative, thourough, knowledgeable, inter-estíng untt succinct
I worked for a managed care center and we tested the Edison machine, but never got it work. When we tried returning the test unit, they didn't even care to take back, that spoke loudly.
I truly hope I am wrong on this but this whole scenario seemed like Pretty girl privilege/underdog story about not needing academia… she never even made a proof of concept and published the results in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. She didn’t demonstrate reliability, validity, efficacy and never even made it to an effectiveness trial.
That's the story I heard. So, you're not alone there in the least. Also the investors she picked leave me highly suspect for her motives as well.
she's the ultimate "girl boss"
absolutely vile
@@alam4359 No, she’s not a “girl boss”, she’s just a narcissist who’s hungry for power and fame. These lame attempts to attack feminism at every little opportunity are pathetic.
@@scorpioigor I think they meant the "MLM's Girl boss" kind of Girl Boss
@@scorpioigor today’s feminism deserves to be attacked though
Why didn't anyone notice that she had no one on the board who knew anything about Science, Pharmaceuticals or technology? Kind of a red flag.
this is a medidical company....lets put some war criminals on the board, I bet that'll help
She said one true thing - in the US, rather than having a first world modern healthcare system, people live in fear of the financial cost of illness
I have to say that as a clinical biochemist I was hyped yet concern for the technology she claimed to had developed. Although the dry chemistry concept isn't new the capability of quick methods of clinical multi- parameters would revolutionize the field
Oh, there's definitely gonna be a movie made about this.
Also, I can GUARANTEE that someone out there is claiming that "big pharma corporations" are trying to discredit Holmes to not lose money 🙄
Hulu recently released their original TV series about her. It’s called Dropout.
@@wahoo4uva He said movie, there is no way hollyweird is letting this go so easily.
Isn’t there already one in the works?
A movie would not be that good. This story has so much going on that you would have to skip a lot of things just to make it fit in a 3 hr+ movie.
@@surfcaster It doesn't matter if it's good. It matters if they can snag more than they paid for it.
She lied to patients and doctors, put on a facade that extended to the very way she spoke, so she should have been convicted
Also, not a crime, but she artificially deepened her voice to supposedly sound more masculine and thus more credible.
Again, that's not a crime but it is kind of silly and shady.
It’s insane how many people she fooled!
@@Juniper122 Imagine Bill Clinton getting fooled by a young woman!
@@Juniper122 Tons of people have pointed out that her secrecy is suspicious and her claims (about being able to run over 200 types of blood tests on a single drop of blood and still gather accurate results) are unsubstantiated. The only people she fooled are wealthy people that are greedy enough to forego their consultants' advices.
@@glenngriffon8032 she willfully lied about her company's service to other companies and her clients, as well as investors, so yeah that's a crime
Who would have thought the person faking her voice was also faking her company
As a biomedical research student, when I first heard about theranos, I thought it was ridiculous. I thought it would be common sense that it would be impossible to do that much with so little blood. Never would've guessed that it would have gone this far.
Remember. If a company defrauds the rich it is so much of an issue a movie gets made. If a company defrauds the general public it's let go with a slap on the wrist or with no punishments at all.
The rich fund the movies. Makes sense.
and a movie still gets made
Yeah, Enron, slap on the wrist. Your talking point don't match reality.
To be fair, its not hard to defraud the general public. The general public is pretty ignorant in most subjects, especially high-tech and biotech, and its easy to make them believe anything. But when a wealthy, supposedly intelligent and discerning investor gets defrauded, thats a lot more interesting to hear about.
@@somebodyintheworld5036 Yeah, like any of those old rich white dudes is « intelligent »
reminds me of someone else's words on toxic positivity in the workplace. if you reward those who always say "yes, this will work, we can do this" and punish those who raise valid concerns, you're not going to know if you have a shit product and you'll end up lying to investors and customers.
I’ve been waiting for this since they first announced her trial
It seemed to me the evidence against her was overwhelming, and she still got basically a slap on the wrist. Why does it take 8 months to sentence her?
Over a decade in prison is hardly a "slap on the wrist". Do you want them to put her up against a wall?
@@TheNodrokov we'll see. Last I heard she's not sentenced until September. IDK. Even w that she'll probably get out early. I bet she only does 2 to 3 years inside regardless of the sentence. We'll see.
@@TheNodrokov she gets to keep a massive amount of money and she'll probably be out of jail in 5 years with our system.
She knowingly put people's lives in danger and stole millions of dollars. People who robbed a convenience store have gotten more time.
@@nicholase2868 and taking money under the guise of healthcare is like robbery with deadly weapon (like a revolver with half bullets being blanks)
@@TheNodrokov no but if she's ill they should wheel in her bread maker and let her get tested.
People died because of he greedy lies.
F her
Holmes had a talent for flattering wealthy old men who are concerned with their own health and mortality. That's it. I also find it amusing that she is, or was, repeatedly compared to Jobs and Gates - neither of whom did the actual "inventing" part of their respective companies' successes. She was either knowingly putting lives at risk selling diagnostic testing that didn't work, or she was grossly negligent in not ensuring her system was at least as accurate as it's competition. Negligence or mendacity. I am sorry for the people who's lives have been harmed by this woman and her enablers, I couldn't care less about the rich men who lost money.
She also had a talent for convincing an uneducated jury to disregard everything they had already been shown to be true about her.
@@connoc5078 It does goes to show just how powerful the skill of manipulating people actually is.
To be fair, Jobs was a good idea man as well as an excellent salesman. He always seemed to know what people wanted a decade before they would have wanted it.
You don't need to be concerned of those rich-men's loss. But our court will take care of those riches, the bank owns our court system. Wakeup.
And the fact that it wasn't her real voice throughtout all these things, amazing!
If I was a ceo and someone came in with a pitch with those eyes barely blinking I will surely be calling the police
Oligarchs are disconnected with reality... they're nuts and a parasitical clowns, a farce on the play of acting as modern day Pharos... or masters of the universe. When in reality they lack any sound judgement on just about all fields, most of them never actually worked an day in their lives. And if they have, it's only in some scam stuff that made their fortune, or fluff work that we (the unwashed masses) would take as errands and/or playing... not working. And some just got lucky being "that guy" that got promoted and established and wrote some books that made them millions.
They live in their own bubble. And have immense power in money and in government.
And this makes them not just dangerous to themselves, but to everyone else living in the same civilization. Think nobility and royalty of old with absolute or even just constitutional monarchical authority.
Thus we get wack a doodles, some rich already like some guy who is on the headlines everyday... som others with googly eyes and a rocket of his own, and others see a poodle haired youngish guy supposedly arbitraging digital fake play money for real money between Japanese Yen and USD between the play money.
And of course, they are also putting on a show too, to attract more investment money to sell all or a portion of their initial shares, and to IPO and sell at will whatever amount they want on the public con market... (caugh) I mean stock market, they see a clown and say sweet this will get notice like masket... the clown of McDonald's... turn the clown into a household name and we have hordes meme stampeding into any IPO to offramp our investment into more mountains of cash than we invested... ie. it's all part of the gimmick... find an outlandish character and they become part of the advertisement campaign in both getting customers and investors. Money honey.
That's the problem right there, feeling like they were "looking into the eyes of Steve Jobs" which should have been followed up by "who's idea is she stealing and rebranding as something they came up with?"
No “hey legal eagles it’s time to think like a lab tech!” My lab tech heart is broken :)
Thank you for the thorough and fantastic breakdown of this case!
Can you do a breakdown of the jury scenes in The Night Of?
Thanks.
I would love to see a breakdown on the current case between Theda v Ascension healthcare in Wisconsin. I think there's a lot of juice there with at-will employment, recruiting, "poaching" and injunctions!