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Holmes and her boyfriend receive criminal indictments. Sounds about right.
Mark another celeb off the Stanford donor roles.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work) -
Another article. This is a good read on the background of exposing Theranos.
I am fascinated by this case, because it shows how “sophisticated” and “wise” investors and celebrity board members are just as gullible to the charms of a fully enabled sociopath as any joe or jane on the street.
This quote is in the article. It comes from James Mattis (the mad dog), and was never published previously. It’s his assessment of Elizabeth Holmes:
“She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics — personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated.”
That’s just unbelievably awful and imperceptive coming from a guy who no doubt has had to deal with his share of careerist frauds. It doesn’t make him any more stupid than the next guy, but then again, I would have expected more.
How do we get taken in by people like Holmes? She creeped me out from the start, and perhaps that’s part of the allure and charm. Of course, I have seen the results of a corporate sociopath before. They can’t be successful on their own, but give them a few apathetic or sycophantic enablers (and Holmes had a LOT), and they can destroy everyone around them to their own benefit.
The amazing part is how some commentary on Holmes that I’m seeing still explains that she was a nice person who was probably misguided in pursuing a dream. No, no, no. That’s the problem with the psychopath: They are great at looking really nice and normal for 98 percent of their time, and really sticking the knife in HARD for the other 2 percent. It’s the 2 percent that makes them the deviant and that invalidates the 98 percent. It’s always shocking to me that people don’t realize this and remain “fooled” even after the psycho is revealed.
It’s also one of the reasons that victims of a corporate psycho are usually very lonely. Everyone around them sees the 98 percent, and they know the 2 percent.
Then again, I suspect you have to have been there to really appreciate what I’m saying.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)-
That’s a great post…”corporate sociopaths” so many times I’ve wanted to beat the ever living apple butter out of those individuals I had the misfortune to have to deal with.
“I remember that one fateful day when Coach took me aside. I knew what was coming. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "I'm off the team, aren't I?" "Well," said Coach, "you never were really ON the team. You made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels, and your helmet is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and then either steal the ball and make us chase you to get it back, or you try to tackle people at inappropriate times." It was all true what he was saying. And yet, I
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She was at Stanford with Young Dawg. Asked him he knew who she was. Yep – guess she was a f-buddy with a football player. I asked if he got any sense that she was warped, or could execute fraud on this scale.
Cryptic answer – She was out there.-
I knew far too many people who were “out there” in my years at Stanford.
I bet, like with Tiger, Stanford’s marketers were thrilled that EH spent a year at Stanford, until they weren’t.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)
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Read ‘Bad Blood’ pretty appalling behavior at Theranos. You could be charitable and say the ‘real fraud’ started ~2012 or to my mind more like ~2008. Hard to believe no investors, Walgreens, nor Safeway ever demanded test results to show the technology worked.
Holmes and Balwani’s behavior toward ‘disloyal’ employees was disgusting. They make paranoid schizophrenics look sane….
the older we get the better we were......
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I finished the book, too. Before I read it, I thought this was going to a bit more Enron-ish where highly technical details were used to create the fraud. But, no…
This was just pure amateur hour with very straightforward deceptions carried to the Nth degree. It was a junior high fraud that carried on so long because of the myth around EH, and the unwillingness of anyone to continue questioning the golden goose. The fact that Walgreens went live after investing $100 plus million without so much as a comparison test says all you need.
I came away from this thinking that a lot of older people were duped badly but it comes down to what the author says: fear of missing out.
What I can’t understand is how “enchanting” Holmes is described as. She is freaky strange, and many people knew she had no command of the technical details, which you can see just by listening to her interviews. She was a myth enabled by marketers and lawyers. Oh, and she is evil to boot. Many destroyed lives and damaged careers reside in her wake.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work)
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