Technically 20 years per count, but realistically not too many. White collar crimes are anyways not punished very strictly, and she&#x27;s a new mother on top of that. She&#x27;ll negotiate a short term at some country club prison.

I&#x27;m not an expert in US sentencing guidelines, but a quick crack at the sentencing guidelines calculator [1] suggests ~97-121 months, or about 8-10 years.[If you&#x27;re not familiar with sentencing, the basic procedure is this:1. Compute an &#x27;offense level&#x27; for each count. For counts that are strongly related (which all of these likely are), combine by taking the maximum offense level. If they&#x27;re not related, it&#x27;s more complicated (not simply adding them up).2. Compute a &#x27;criminal history level&#x27;. For Holmes, that&#x27;s basically &quot;no criminal history.&quot;3. Adjust for things like the convicted person&#x27;s remorse or cooperation with investigators.4. Look up a table that maps offense and criminal history to an actual sentencing range.5. Adjust that (primarily, but not exclusively, in the previously output range) based on the judge&#x27;s feelings.][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sentencing.us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sentencing.us&#x2F;</a>

These are big wins! Some huge sums up there. How many years is she looking at?

Why would a mistrial be declared? Does that prevent a future prosecution of these charges?

Apparently the &quot;No verdict&quot; might get declared a mistrial on 3 counts.For those unaware John Carreyrou played a major role in exposing Holmes. His book is a good read: Bad Blood and host of Bad Blood: The Final Chapter<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JohnCarreyrou&#x2F;status&#x2F;1478158063379042304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JohnCarreyrou&#x2F;status&#x2F;1478158063379042304</a>&gt; And the judge will probably declare a mistrial as to the 3 counts they couldn’t reach consensus on.&gt; The 4 guilty counts are all investor counts. The investor conspiracy count and the counts relating to the hedge fund PFM, the ex Cravath attorney Mosley and the DeVos family.EDIT: Mistrial only on those 3 counts which got no verdict, not the full trial. Also this is only if the Feds want to do it or now which will also depend upon how many years Holmes gets as well as if she just decides to plead guilty on those 3 charges.

No. The very fact this trial occurred is testament to that fact.

My understanding is that it worked in the sense that the results were accurate.  But the results were gotten by means other than what the investors&#x2F;customers thought.  So the end-user patients really had no claim since they got correct results.  But the companies and investors got scammed bigtime.

Short answer: &quot;no.&quot;Longer answer: Theranos never really got their own custom machines working. Until those machines were working, they did use other machines and processes which did work. However, their entire shtick was trying to do a lot of tests on less blood than usual, so... they simply diluted the blood samples to get enough volume for those machines to function in the first place, and correspondingly, the results were absolute garbage. Effectively, they were using working machines incorrectly to cover up for their non-working machines.

There&#x27;s a podcast called bad blood that goes into detail how little it worked.

Round number minus various transfer fees maybe?

It&#x27;s probably minus the wire fee, so you can round up.

Because someone says &quot;I&#x27;ll invest $100,000,000&quot; and it&#x27;s not evenly divisible by the share price.

What an odd sums of money ending with 9s. Does anyone know why such numbers were picked?

I wonder if that was because they used other testing methods to check patient samples, so they patient got a result regardless of the means by which it was obtained.

Can you expand? Investors are risk-heavy VCs who expect more than 50% of investments to failPatients just saw a blood testing service promising the same accuracy as a blood draw and went for it

I feel the exact opposite. The investors that actually did their due diligence ran away from Theranos. I feel no sympathy for the investors that bought into it. I do however feel tremendous sympathy for the patients that received erroneous test results.

Don&#x27;t know all of the details behind each count, but glad to see this result, which seems good and fair. Basically, looks like the majority of &quot;committing fraud against investors&quot; charges were guilty, but the &quot;committing fraud against patients&quot;, which always seemed like more of a stretch to me, were not guilty.

Interesting you can tell how much the wire transfer fee was in each case. How does it compare to the major crypto exchanges?

It&#x27;s fraud case, so it exists entirely because someone was separated from their money illegally. I imagine in part this case was brought to protect some of that money through insurance, which may pay out if the fraud is proven.

I think it&#x27;s about wire fraud because the prosecution was able to prove she had motive to commit fraud. Whereas with the patients, it seems, the jury believed she did not intend to cause fraud upon the patients.

Boy, it&#x27;s all about the wire-fraud, isn&#x27;t it?  The MONEY itself seems to have filed this lawsuit.

<pre><code> Count one of conspiring to commit wire fraud against investors in Theranos between 2010 and 2015: Guilty.

 Count two of conspiring to commit wire fraud against patients who paid for Theranos’s blood testing services between 2013 and 2016: Not guilty.

 Count three of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $99,990 on or about Dec. 30, 2013: No verdict.

 Count four of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $5,349,900 on or about Dec. 31, 2013: No verdict.

 Count five of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $4,875,000 on or about Dec. 31, 2013: No verdict.

 Count six of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $38,336,632 on or about Feb. 6, 2014: Guilty.

 Count seven of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $99,999,984 on or about Oct. 31, 2014:Guilty.

 Count eight of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $5,999,997 on or about Oct. 31, 2014: Guilty.

 Count nine was dropped.

 Count 10 of wire fraud in connection with a patient’s laboratory blood test results on or about May 11, 2015: Not guilty.

 Count 11 of wire fraud in connection with a patient’s laboratory blood test results on or about May 16, 2015: Not guilty.

 Count 12 of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $1,126,661 on or about Aug. 3, 2015: Not guilty.</code></pre>

CNBC says that &quot;Jury finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four charges in criminal fraud trial&quot; while confirming that there&#x27;s deadlock in three charges: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;03&#x2F;jurors-in-holmes-trial-remain-deadlocked-on-three-of-11-fraud-counts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;03&#x2F;jurors-in-holmes-trial-remai...</a>

And you d expect they d ask a random Indian in the street just it case, as you seem to say, this would be so trivial people dont feel the need to explain it.

Interesting, and is his birthday Sunday, June 13, 1965?

&quot;Sunny&quot; is a common nickname in India but it has nothing to do with the day you were born on.

I am Indian and I&#x27;ve never heard the &quot;day of the week as nickname&quot; thing. Nicknames are generally shortened first names or (in hindu cases) based on some astrological calculations that are too detailed to explain here.

The one thing I remember distinctly about Balwani (although I can&#x27;t remember where from) was him boasting about the 100k LOC he wrote while at Microsoft. Like it was supposed to be a badge of honour or indicator of intellectual prowess.

This is absolutely incorrect. Saturday is called &quot;Shani&quot;-var (pronounced shunny) after the name for the Hindu god of justice [1]. Hindus also map his presence to the planet Saturn. Either way, no relation to the name Sunny at all. Source: several Indian friends of ages 18-50.1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shani" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shani</a>

&gt; Very little is known of Mr. Balwani, including why he is called “Sunny.”This might be because Saturday in Hindi and other Indian languages is “sunny-var”, and the day of the week you are born on is a common nickname, in conjunction with “sunny” being an easy to pronounce and common English word.

More complete summary from the NY Times:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;03&#x2F;technology&#x2F;elizabeth-holmes-trial-verdict#count-by-count-heres-what-jurors-decided-on-elizabeth-holmes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;03&#x2F;technology&#x2F;elizabeth...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29789074" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29789074</a>

Would be curious to here a law-person speculate even if it&#x27;s just a guess.

NO formal sentencing by Judge Davila yet, including the length of imprisonment and fines (technically the judge can overturn a jury-declared guilt, however it&#x27;s very unlikely here).(&quot;U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila will sentence Holmes at a later date.&quot;, according to CNBC.)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;elizabeth-holmes-theranos-case-feds-claim-patient-harms-related-to-hiv-pregnancy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;elizabeth-holmes-ther...</a>&gt; On Monday, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys responded. “Thousands of patients received unreliable blood tests, depriving them of money or property, placing their health at risk and, in many cases, causing actual harm,” prosecutors alleged in a filing in U.S. district court in San Jose.Considering the vast weight of the harms she caused, in a &quot;fair&quot; retributive justice system, she would get far worse the sentences routinely doled out to typical criminals.But the US &quot;justice system&quot; is hardly &quot;fair&quot;.Personally, I don&#x27;t really believe in retributive justice. The light sentences afforded to privileged criminals bother me, but what bothers me more are the draconian sentences received by those of less privilege.

Not sure but I would be interested in knowing how many years people think she deserves?

a single charge can be 20 years. likely the charges will run concurrently, so probably less than 10 years if I had to guess, which is the cutoff for a minimum security prison.

I laughed at that. Apparently the wire transfer fee part is the money is free and clear!!!

Legal firms for investment often take a 1-2% fee for contract work and running the deal. I wonder if the $16 came out of their cut

Hey, minus the $16 wire-transfer fee.  Fair is fair; that’s what I pay, too.

Nobody invests large amounts in someone they do not know; that&#x27;s why connections and introductions were a key element of the case.

There is usually a contract stipulating details, but yes, VCs tend to use banks

There are lawyers and contracts involved. There are people who connect the money and the startup,these guys have relationships with the money people so there is trust at that level, but lawyers for the rest of it.

Would you prefer they deliver it in cash? There are associated legal docs you sign, but other than that it&#x27;s not super complicated.

The wire transfer is just how the money exchanges hands. There would be a contract of some sort defining why that money is changing hands, and with what strings attached.

big difference between wiring $100 million to Vanguard vs. $100 million to fund a blood testing start-up

I&#x27;m honestly very curious as to what better ways you have in mind for transferring large sums of money.

Refer to Wickard v Filburn. Whether a transaction leaves the state doesn&#x27;t mean dick to interstate commerce clause. The interstate commerce is interpreted to mean basically any possession&#x2F;production&#x2F;consumption of goods regardless if they leave the state or even enter commerce. Supreme court decided even growing crops for use on animals on your own land is interstate commerce.This is the reason why you can catch a federal charge for growing your own pot or making your own machine gun, despite it never leaving your property nor any desire or act to enter commerce&#x2F;trade. Even merely _where_ you store your goods for personal non-commercial use in your own state is considered interstate commerce, a la Gun-Free School Zone Act.

This is not some random Western Union fly-by-night process. These are serious bank-to-bank transfers with plenty of documentation about who&#x27;s who on both ends. That documentation is required not only by bank policy but by law (e.g. IRS and anti-terrorism laws). The fact that the wire transfers are highlighted so much in the charges is that they are interstate transactions, which makes them federal crimes rather than state crimes. Which gives the Feds an excuse to get involved.

A $100 million wire transfer. Is this literally how people invest in start-ups, just wiring huge sums of money to someone they do not know , on a promise&#x2F;hope.that just seems so reckless on so many levels

One reason is that if this trial ended in not guilty on all counts they would be unlikely to prosecute a successful case against Balwani. they have a stronger hand now and Balwani may choose a plea deal before trial now, which the prosecution may accept due to today&#x27;s result.

Ah, looks like they updated the OP article as well - this makes more sense!

I was under the impression that it was set for February of _this_ year (2022) per [1]?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-12-14&#x2F;balwani-s-theranos-fraud-trial-delayed-as-holmes-fight-drags-on" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-12-14&#x2F;balwani-s...</a>

They were initially meant to be tried together, but Holmes&#x27; legal team requested a separate trial because part of their strategy was to portray her as abused and controlled by Balwani and shift the blame on him. His trial is to start a few weeks from now.

It looks like Balwani&#x27;s trial is scheduled for next year - is there any reason why they would have the two trials so far apart? Is this common in cases such as these?

I wonder if they get to hear what the sentence is before they decide on the remaining 3?

Not an expert, but I believe no verdict usually means &quot;not guilty but the prosecutor can try again if they want to&quot;.Considering she was found guilty on 4, it&#x27;s not obvious that they will bother.

 So she was found guilty on 4 charges. Not guilty on 4 charges. And no verdict on the remaining 3 charges. So does she have to get another trial on the remaining 3?

They said collector, so I suspect they aren&#x27;t holding to sell :P

To be completely honest, I&#x27;m more of a buyer than a seller. I have a few items that are &quot;worth&quot; (in a loose sense) in the hundreds and thousands, but most are nothing more than a rare conversation piece I have on my desk.

I don&#x27;t remember where I first heard this, but it&#x27;s good advice: don&#x27;t collect as an investment, collect because you really enjoy the objects. I collect rare books, but never because I think they&#x27;ll go up in value (although they probably will). I just like having them around. Socially, infamous corpo-swag is really even better - what a conversation starter! But I personally wouldn&#x27;t want that sort of stuff in my shared spaces. Interesting or not, its still just corpo-swag.

What a super interesting niche. Do you see returns on your investments?

One of my prized possessions is a Kozmo-branded CD opener, which I got by ordering a single CD from Kozmo, with free one-hour delivery. Thanks, venture capital!

I know someone who has both beenz and flooz promotional stuff

Ooh I used to have an amazing Kozmo keychain. When I lost those keys I was more upset about losing the chain than my house keys!

I laughed at the CueCat, but now I wish I had one of my own.

One of my biggest regrets is not getting a Kozmo messenger bag from dotcom 1.

This is a really cool hobby I never would&#x27;ve guessed existed. Good luck to you!

I’ve got a nice looking Ozy coffee mug if you’re interested.

This is some of the scammiest markets of all time.Hey OP, I got a Theranos-branded mug I can drop-ship you from Alibaba. $800 OBO

I try my best to only procure swag that was actually distributed by the company at time of operation. As an example, you can buy &quot;joke&quot; Enron t-shirts, which I wouldn&#x27;t be interested in, but some authentic team building event-specific shirt distributed to 50ish people? Oh baby, I&#x27;m all ears.I think that&#x27;s part of the fun, hunting for the original stuff.

I assume you could buy the stuff from the company&#x27;s bankruptcy auction or when it gets auctioned off by the Feds like in the case of Martin Shkreli&#x27;s exclusive Wu Tang album.

What does &quot;authentic&quot; mean here? Isn&#x27;t company swag just the company emailing a logo to 3rd parties who print it on shirts&#x2F;whatever?

Practice sound risk management!   I still have a coffee cup and a a garment bag that I bought for 10$

I have a lehnen brothers decision cube type of thing and it has some pretty interesting ones like &quot;responsible risk management&quot; erc

The whole bre-x saga really amazes some Americans when I explain the depths of fraud that have historically existed in AB and BC small cap mining stocks...For the longest time the historical Vancouver stock exchange, vsx, was known as something like the fraud capital of North America.All of that is before we even get into the ugly history of some Canadian mining companies that have got into bed with non-democratic regimes in places in the developing world, where they did actually have a real mineral resource to extract, and damn the consequences.

Holy cow...Bre-X that takes me back. People were actually suicided in that one.

Along these lines an old investor I knew kept a framed Bre-X share on his wall.

That&#x27;s your job. Sellers are motivated to provide evidence. &quot;I just have it lol&quot; is not going to command much premium over your costs.

How exactly do you check if something is authentic? I can have a hundred Theranos-branded t-shirts, mugs, pens, diaries, socks and whatever else you want made and shipped to me in like 2 weeks.

I never knew this was a thing, but now that I do...I want in!

I can totally get behind this. Holding tight on my Blockchains LLC swag half-hoping there will have a wider audience of recognition than the other people at that Prague conference. The other half hoping they actually manage to create something of lasting value, of course ;)

Well well… I imagine we’ve crossed paths on eBay before - too funny.

I am also a fucked company swag collector and Theranos has been my white whale since 2015&#x2F;early 2016. Now it’s all knockoffs. I wish you luck in your search!

Why not a stock certificate :-)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apmex.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;50847&#x2F;enron-corp-stock-certificate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apmex.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;50847&#x2F;enron-corp-stock-certifi...</a>

My intern job back in 2005 was to take Enron&#x27;s wind turbine division&#x27;s technical handbooks and scan them on large flat bed scanners. They were all stored in Tehachapi desert, flooded and with water damage. I found a bunch of cool stuff in these boxes including a binder containing Enron&#x27;s branding assets and standards manual.

Do you have the epic ENRON intern Tshirt in your collection ?

The metal ones? They still have those at the offices

I have a WeWork shirt that says &quot;The Future Is Awesome&quot;. I used to hate it but now I love it :D

I&#x27;ve got two beer glasses from WeWork that say &quot;glass half full&quot; on them. They make me laugh every single time I see them.

Promo freebies change so often that you can often work out what company and what year made a particular squeeze toy or similar.And rip offs will often have subpar artwork obviously not using original AI&#x2F;EPS files.

&gt;I always find it interesting to learn what obscure things folks collect.A buddy of mine has a similar fascination with picking things up from defunct companies, specializing in film&#x2F;video post production companies. One of the items he picked up was a standard banker&#x27;s box. Inside were a pile of CD-Rs which turned out to be the entire digital back up of an unfinished 3D animated feature. The entire recordings of the actor&#x27;s lines. The 3D objects, scenes, etc to an unknown level of completeness. Even though the work product was purchased from the bankruptcy auction, the copyright was still owned by the creators and could not be rendered&#x2F;released just because they bought a box in auction for $20.

Authenticity aside, I&#x27;d still buy that voice lowering vocoder.

&gt; I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraudThat&#x27;s a really cool collection! I always find it interesting to learn what obscure things folks collect.&gt; any authentic Theranos gearHow do you tell if it&#x27;s authentic? If I was a collector in this area, my big concern would be that especially given that the market is hot, someone could just look on ebay for images of branded products, and then make replicas of them by passing the same logo onto promotional printers.

&gt;I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud
This is why I log on to this site.

&gt; But everything else I saw for mugs and hats and t-shirts was in the $20-50 range.Seems like plenty of new things not collectors items.

Most of those were likely never truly distributed specifically to employees in the first place. Reprint or print on demand swag is generally obvious with the white background. Look for real photos, especially in people’s homes.In my totally arbitrary set of rules the item must have been available or given to employees only.Here’s one I’d love to get my hands on if not for the price: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;255014966170?hash=item3b6013939a:g:rroAAOSw6IpgxUU9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;255014966170?hash=item3b6013939a:g:...</a>

&gt;the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you&#x27;re curious).I was curious. My ebay search for &quot;theranos&quot; turned up 50 items. There were fleece jackets with high asking prices, so that certainly was something. But everything else I saw for mugs and hats and t-shirts was in the $20-50 range.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;sch&#x2F;i.html?_nkw=theranos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;sch&#x2F;i.html?_nkw=theranos</a>

I worked with a guy who collected stock certificates of dead startups that he&#x27;d worked at, and displayed then in frames on his wall. I think he called them good misspent youth.The Lehman Brothers risk management&#x2F;principles cube was a hot seller for a while, but I&#x27;m curious as to long term valuations. Thought the art collection didn&#x27;t actually do that well on resale.

Someone in my neighborhood wore a Theranos sweatshirt while jogging last year, I made up a story in my head that it was in solidarity with Ms. Holmes. If I&#x27;m right, I assume she wouldn&#x27;t be willing to part with it.

What an awesome collection&#x2F;hobby Thanks for sharing. Is there any way to see all that you have?. I became interested in this after seeing someone with an Enron shirt on at a music festival earlier this year. Surely it was not an “original”, as you collect, but it had me reflecting on the artistic value.

If anyones got a juicero lmk I’ll pay double market haha

Maybe contact @pud and turn his old <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fuckedcompany.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fuckedcompany.com&#x2F;</a> website into an online museum for that swag.

About 15 years ago, I worked at a small tech&#x2F;political agency in DC. We got a new office just off NW 16th &amp; K near the lobbying &amp; financial areas. While I was setting up the server closet, I found a rolled-up blueprint from the office design. We unrolled it and... turns out it was built by Enron. Ken Lay had just died, so we always kinda-sorta felt haunted by his ghost.

I totally get this! I would LOVE to have some Theranos crap. Then I would fabricate stories about why I have it, just like a real Theranos CEO!(Hmm... might as well fabricate the collectibles themselves, as some other commenters have suggested...)

&gt; my Orwellian yellow plastic “Great Place To Work” Intel tamborineThat sounds hilarious, can you post a picture?

My favorite tshirt is for a company picnic for Enron (scheduled for after it’s dissolution); the back is covered in MBAspeak: honesty, integrity, … It’s one of my favorites — up there with my Orwellian yellow plastic “Great Place To Work” Intel tamborine.

Perhaps trucks roll downhill better if the occupant is wearing branded swag?

That&#x27;s funny. I was just talking a friend of mine the other day that is printing a bunch of swag gear for Nikola Motors.  I would guess he doesn&#x27;t know the history of Nikola Motors and I didn&#x27;t say anything, but I was thinking, how much swag does a potential scam company need?

Great timing! Not sure if this qualifies, but I just listed a copy of the Oct 2015 Inc Magazine where she was touted as &quot;The Next Steve Jobs&quot;. Was a subscriber back in the day. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;255312572520" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;255312572520</a>

I do have two refrigerator magnets from Webvan, which died in 2001. Was a pretty cool service while it lasted.

I worked at Lehman for a year around 1999&#x2F;2000. While I was there, they handed out these plinths, I still have mine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;NKnJh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;NKnJh</a>

For anyone who wants to read more about this hobby: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;TCdngY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;TCdngY</a>

thanks for sharing -- most entertaining thread i&#x27;ve read in quite some time

I wish I&#x27;d known that notorious S.W.A.G. was A Thing because I pegged her as a scam artist when she first entered the public sphere. Next time my spidey-senses tip me off I&#x27;m gonna acquire as much promotional material as possible.

Happen to own a juicero? Its a dream to have that on a shelf one day.

Oh wow, I remember using that app in high-school. That&#x27;s awesome.

I have some yik yak socks I got a few months before they went bankrupt. Didn’t know there’s a market for that.

Reminds me of the water bottle from Palantir I have that seems very cursed.

If you&#x27;re in the mood to sell, I&#x27;d be interested. 0 -&gt; o + .co @ gmail.I like hubris branding for the same (mythical) reason Canadian engineers do iron rings [0]: so that maybe when I&#x27;m waivering on an important decision, I&#x27;ll look down at the logo on my coffee cup and remember that some things are more important than immediate professional gratification.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Iron_Ring" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Iron_Ring</a>

Classic pics, thanks for sharing. I’d love to see the full quote in the first photo. It almost reminds me of Office Space.

Huh. I never realized until this moment just how much I want to wear a work shirt that identifies me as &#x27;Misty&#x27; from Theranos.

&quot;Risk more than others think is wise&quot;, well, you have to admit they followed through on that wall tattoo.

A colleague of mine was contracted by one of several firms tasked with liquidating Theranos&#x27; Newark facilities back in Aug 2018. I took the opportunity to grab the equivalent of $15,000 of tools, furniture, scientific equipment, and of course, swag. All legally - liquidators are tasked with clearing the site of everything by a set time.Had free reign throughout the facility for two days, scavenging through 200k sqft+ of warehouse, marveling at the cringey pseudo-motivational blather posted everywhere and grabbing whatever could fit into my apartment at the time. At one point, we spotted Holmes (and her &quot;special needs&quot; Siberian Husky puppy who left dribbles of urine on the warehouse floor) arguing with some operators from afar.We weren&#x27;t allowed to touch specific computers, chemicals or any hardware locked in the cages (incl Edison devices), but everything else was up for grabs, from high-end Mitutoyo measuring tools to Aeron chairs to U-Line desks, Theranos bumper stickers, water bottles, etc etc etc.So yeah, I&#x27;ve got a few bits of Theranos branded gear... Still waiting on the right time to sell.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;36HtZCp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;36HtZCp</a>

I have a hat that says &quot;The Tonight Show with Conan O&#x27;Brien&quot; from the very first taping (and only seven months before the last taping!).

This reminds me of the Black Mirror&#x27;s &quot;Black Museum&quot; episode...

It’s not totally defunct yet but I saved a bunch of super rare Magic Leap swag exactly for people like you lol

stock up now on swag from Exxon, BP, Shell, etc., and leave it a few decades!

That&#x27;s hilarious and cool. You got a list of desirable brands? Off the top of my head I can only think of Enron, Lehman Brothers and Theranos.

Now I want some, look at what you&#x27;ve started.

We still have a nice Webvan magnet on our fridge somewhere. Good times.

I still have the Enron mug which I nicked from their London office.

I&#x27;ve actually wanted to write about people who do this kind of collection! If you&#x27;re interested in talking more about it, lemme know! charliewarzel@gmail.com

So... Found this thread via a former coworker...I have a friend who is cousins with Elizabeth Holmes. His mom was her first investor and she has the original stock certificates... They&#x27;re planning on turning them into NFT&#x27;s and selling them.

Do you have an email for contacting you at?

This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we&#x27;re a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you&#x27;re curious).Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a feeling this verdict is going to spice things up in the short term.All that to be said, if you&#x27;ve got any authentic Theranos gear hiding in storage please do let me know, I&#x27;m a motivated buyer.For those curious as one example: Nothing raises a few eyebrows more than a note written on Lehman Brothers letterhead with a Purdue Pharma OxyContin pen with the dosage pullout.

She strikes me as the cute blonde version of Orson Welles in The Third Man...

The sociopaths who are attracted to founder life are immune to this lesson.

I think that&#x27;s the key point here. Was Jucero fraud? I think there&#x27;s a clear line between a) we have an idea for a product but we have certain limitations that are feasible to overcome, with more time and investment; versus b) we have a product, we&#x27;re using it in the field, patients are using it, and it works great. In the first scenario, you could fake the dream but you&#x27;re not promising something that you know to be absolutely false.

Faking it doesn&#x27;t work if you are committing fraud?

What&#x27;s an example of a fakery that doesn&#x27;t harm innocent parties? If you pretend a product (or a feature) that doesn&#x27;t exist exists, then at the very least a competitor is unfairly harmed.

Fake it all you want until your fakery harms innocent parties.

She was not found guilty on any charges of harming or swindling patients.This was about the wealthy investors. They will come after you whether you fake medical devices or bombs.

the point is she could have never made it. First year grads of meds schools would look at it and tell you its impossible. Its like knowing a floppy stores 1.44 MB and showing it as a breaking technology - we won&#x27;t change anything but we tell you it will fit 16TB with our magical formula.

Maybe don&#x27;t fake &quot;medical devices&quot; till you make it.

This is by the way but I love the phrase &quot;upstart startup.&quot;

It&#x27;s fairly common to see an element of outright fakery before the hopeful-but-not-guaranteed &quot;till you make it&quot;.A coworker was using a mobile app from a startup offering to do &quot;receipt OCR using AI&#x2F;ML&quot; when in fact they were sending most of the scanned pictures to a call-center in India to be manually entered. They hadn&#x27;t yet figured out the fancy image recognition algorithm, so they were just throwing AWS Mechanical Turk at it while building up a user base. Realistically, they might never get to that level of AI while staying solvent.That&#x27;s not so different ethically to what Theranos was doing. The only difference with Theranos is the scale of it all.

I thought &quot;fake it till you make it&quot; was more of an individual strategy, not a company strategy. If a company behaves like an established company would, they are not faking anything, they are behaving like an established company would. For the individual strategy it&#x27;s more about combating impostor syndrome. At higher levels many people have this feeling that others have something they don&#x27;t, so it&#x27;s telling people to just accept that feeling and be the impostor, because, in fact, everyone is an impostor anyway.

FITYMI can also be interpreted as presenting yourself (and company) with confidence that sometimes only more successful people (and companies) radiate. Like the comment above says, this does _not_ mean lying.

&quot;Fake it till you make it&quot; originally meant behaving as an established company would, as opposed to presenting yourself as an upstart startup without a lot of customers. Basically: Professional website, formal company structure, normal business sales practices, having people available to answer the phones, and so on. You still had to do the work and deliver the results, but the goal was to overcome hesitancy to use startups instead of established companies.It didn&#x27;t mean literally lying about your capabilities or accomplishments in order to garner more investment money.That&#x27;s not &quot;fake it till you make it&quot;. That&#x27;s just fraud. It&#x27;s not really hard to distinguish between the two, despite the way some people are trying to merge the two definitions.

I could almost see &quot;fake it til you make it&quot; if your idea is based on already proven technology, but success depends on something like brand recognition, network effect, etc. In the case of Theranos, whether her technology worked or not was ultimately going to be decided by Mother Nature, not by a market.

No, no, no. I see this all the time around Theranos (&quot;Hey, there are lots of other fake-it-til-you-make-it companies out there, Theranos just went to extremes&quot;), and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s accurate, at all.The line around fraud is really not that gray. If you&#x27;re lying about current facts for personal gain, that&#x27;s fraud. You can hype all you want about the future, and most VCs are actually fine with you selling them the &quot;yeah, it&#x27;s hamster wheels in the backend now, but just wait until we build out our tech and scale!&quot; line (just see all the well funded &quot;AI&quot; startups that just have legions of people &quot;training&quot; the AI), but if you say that it&#x27;s the whizbang tech right now, but it&#x27;s really just hamster wheels, that&#x27;s fraud.Fraud is not just an extension of &quot;aggressive selling&quot;.

Some founders &quot;fake it till you make it&quot;, and this news should serve as a cautionary tale.

Can someone share some light on what&#x27;s covered in the wire transfers?

Maybe they&#x27;re closer to it now that they&#x27;ve just successfully released another movie on another streaming service.

That project has been in the works for many years now, and is no closer to seeing the light of day. Hulu&#x27;s miniseries &#x27;The Dropout&#x27;, with Amanda Seyfried, debuts in March though.

Looking forward to JLaw&#x27;s portrayal of Holmes in Adam McKay&#x27;s Apple Studios adaptation of Bad Blood. Hope they pick up from where the book ended and cover this trial.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;film&#x2F;news&#x2F;jennifer-lawrence-elizabeth-holmes-apple-adam-mckay-1235128044&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;film&#x2F;news&#x2F;jennifer-lawrence-elizabe...</a>

In other words, successful &quot;fraud laundering&quot;.

&gt; It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.Not excusing it, but maybe it was a company vs personal thing (eg. consumer harm perhaps didn&#x27;t pierce the corporate veil[1]). Whereas Fraud against investors is much more of a personal&#x2F;individual thing.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;wex&#x2F;piercing_the_corporate_veil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;wex&#x2F;piercing_the_corporate_veil</a>

&gt;&gt; test results where in general correctish, they where just not gotten in exactly the way it was claimed, which was also not noticable less reliable or anything.Guess they just answered the question of &quot;If you can&#x27;t tell the difference, does it matter?&quot;.

Wasn&#x27;t Theranos&#x27; claim that they could do tests from much less blood? So how could the results be accurate if they presumably didn&#x27;t have enough samples?

If Theranos still existed as a company, some of their results were bogus enough that they probably could get sued (IANAL).  But Theranos doesn&#x27;t exist any more.

&quot;test results where in general correctish&quot;&quot;we gave you treatmemt for wrong type of cancer, close enought!&quot;

&gt; test results where in general correctishThey diluted the blood. They couldn&#x27;t possibly be correct.

&gt; defrauding patients about their test resultsBecause und test results where in general correctish, they where just not gotten in exactly the way it was claimed, which was also not noticable less reliable or anything.And what the user bought was the test result.As far as I understood, with my very limited understanding of US law it seems hard to sue as a consumer as you where deceived but not hurt&#x2F;damaged in any way.

Could this be because they were secretly doing the testing using traditional lab testing machines (as described in Bad Blood)? Maybe that made it hard to prove any specific test was tainted.

Fraud means that you lied for personal gain. There is more evidence of her lying directly to investors than to patients.

Prosecution went for both, but the jury only agreed with the fraud.

My layman&#x27;s interpretation is that she willingly defrauded investors but did in fact deliver test results to the patients, albeit at a lower quality level than you would expect in the industry.I think in the HBO documentary they say the unravelling started because of FDA complaints on the bloodwork being sub par. But I think you can&#x27;t jail someone for 120 years because they did a shoddy product. Maybe the prosecutors simply went for the biggest bang for their buck?

My understanding is they took much smaller samples of blood which lead to lots of reproducibility problems. The standard machines they were using were being fed with up-sampled blood because Theranos didn&#x27;t have the normal sample size.&gt; People were getting good results because Theranos was using machines from Siemens in their hidden lab.Thus the tests sometimes were good, and sometimes bad. Some patients underwent unnecessary medical treatments and procedures based on bad tests.

I believe they also reverse engineered a lot of the third party machines, in an attempt to make them work the way they wanted to. That&#x27;s... that&#x27;s bad.

They were using traditional siemens for most tests but were doing some tests with a fingerprick that they diluted - like their PSA test sometimes coming back super high for cis women, indicating that they had prostate cancer.

They had a fully functional lab though, it just wasn&#x27;t using Theranos&#x27; devices.This is what they did to Wallgreens, they sold them on the idea that they would have theranos machines in-store, but instead what they did was do IV blood draws (calling it a comparison check) .. and then would just process the samples the same way as everyone else using standard equipment.People were getting good results because Theranos was using machines from Siemens in their hidden lab.

&quot;Everything is securities fraud&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-06-26&#x2F;everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-06-26&#x2F;everyt...</a>

It&#x27;s more that wire fraud can cover pretty much anything, making it a lot easier for the feds to get a conviction. Plus, the charges weren&#x27;t related to the festival or its investors; it was for a whole different scammy &quot;venture.&quot;I&#x27;m not even sure they could be criminally charged for a sham festival since the festival did actually happen. I&#x27;d imagine that the whole thing turning out to be a complete wreck would probably be something that could be handled in a civil case.

Iirc with Fyre Festival the dude got convicted of wire fraud for defrauding an investor, not for selling tickets to a sham festival. The joke was, screw the small people, that&#x27;s fine, screw a rich investor, that&#x27;s when you go to jail...

In one sense you are correct, just because investors are knowingly making speculative investments, that doesn&#x27;t make it OK to defraud them.On the other hand, perhaps the argument was that investors know there&#x27;s a risk and know they should be skeptical. It would be unreasonable to expect patients requesting a blood test to be suspicious and question the results.

&gt;&gt; Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it&#x27;s why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans.The above does not excuse fraud. Investors know their investments are risky, but that does not give you permission to deliberately lie or mislead, with an intent to deceive the potential investor.For example, if you tell investors that you anticipate getting $50M in new contracts over the next year, well, assuming you mean it in good faith, that&#x27;s not fraud even if it doesn&#x27;t pan out or was delusional to begin with.If you tell an investor you just signed a contract for $50M, in order to get them to invest, and that&#x27;s a total lie, that&#x27;s fraud. Whether or not the investor did appropriate due diligence to confirm that fact or not, it&#x27;s still criminal.

There was pretty strong evidence she defrauded investors, lots of hard evidence of her making claims that we now know aren&#x27;t true. I haven&#x27;t heard much strong evidence that she intentionally defrauded patients though. I think it is totally possible that she lied to investors about Theranos&#x27;s capabilities (ex. How many tests they could run), while still thinking that the tests they were running were accurate.

As other posters have commented, since they were claiming results from much smaller samples, these &quot;good&quot; machines weren&#x27;t given the amount of blood required for reliable results so this is also fraudulent and much worse imho because the people operating these machines must have know they were artifically amplifying samples.

They farmed out the patient results to real machines pretending they were using Theranos. So they were technically real.

To me it seems like a simple matter of don&#x27;t mess with people that have money.

My impression is that the defense put the onus on the lab directors etc and that she didn&#x27;t know what was going on. I don&#x27;t buy that, but the jury is supposed to go on only evidence presented at the trial, so I guess the defense did a good job.

It’s the elephant in the room. Hardly ever remarked upon but a complete head scratcher. This company is fated to play a staring role in at least one conspiracy theory going forward.

&gt; It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.my thoughts exactly. i&#x27;m woefully underread on the whole situation but something is weird and different about it.one thing that does jump to mind is that the investor list and board composition isn&#x27;t what i&#x27;m used to seeing for stem ventures. i can imagine that perhaps they&#x27;re less forgiving of failure and were operating with more blind trust in company leadership on stem&#x2F;technology matters.

Great source! Thank you!For those stuck at the end of first day coverage the way I found is: type «from:doratki day 2» in search

I&#x27;ve been reading Dorothy Atkins&#x27; live tweet coverage of the trial since day 1, and it gives a blow by blow account of it. It starts at [1], and runs all the way up until the verdict. Strongly recommended.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;doratki&#x2F;status&#x2F;1435590320897478657" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;doratki&#x2F;status&#x2F;1435590320897478657</a>

Don’t forget she is still facing 3 counts that were declared mistrialed. She could get longer.

How does it work in a case where the customer&#x27;s relationship is with a reseller, but the reseller was given false information from the test maker? Is only the test maker liable, or are both the reseller and test maker liable?

Are Walgreen&#x27;s customers given any sort of guarantee about the results?I mean, if you could find someone that experience material loss from it, or death, I think they&#x27;d have a very legitimate chance to sue. It&#x27;s not clear to me what promises Walgreen&#x27;s is actually making though.

I feel like John Carreyrou deserves a medal for exposing the entire scam. First in WSJ articles and then in his book, which is a great read. It&#x27;s incredible how much trouble this caused for him when Theranos tried to fight him.Who knows how long the scam would have continued without him, and how many more people would have gotten bogus test results.If Tiger Woods can get a presidential medal of freedom for playing golf, it seems like it&#x27;s the least they could do for Carreyrou.

I agree the proof for defrauding investors was less arguable. However there were still clear indications that she should have known the tests offered to patients were unreliable. For example, Schultz told her, before resigning, that it was not OK for Theranos to continue re-running their benchmark tests until they got a passing result (kind of like shaking the magic 8 ball until it, on the fourth shake, correctly answers the question “Is today Sunday?” — then selling it as an oracle). One employee flagged it for her attention that females were getting results that should only be possible if they had prostates — and she dismissed this as well! There was other evidence introduced during court that showed she knew the tests her company was doing for customers were not as accurate as she claimed, too. I would have loved to see her found guilty on these counts as a result, and I would also love to hear about the jurors&#x27; reasoning for not doing so.

Just going by Carryous podcast, it seems like there was a lot more hard evidence (emails, transcripts, texts, etc) that she was knowingly lying to investors.  On the other hand, I don&#x27;t think there was any hard proof that she didnt know the results delivered by her labs (which were using third party machines, albeit ones being used improperly), were bunk.

What happened to the people working for Holmes&#x2F;Theranos who were doing the legwork of systematically and knowingly defrauding patients?

&gt; [She wasn’t] really being charged with [wire fraud with regard to] patientsUnless the word &quot;really&quot; is doing some heavy lifting here, this is incorrect. There were multiple counts directly and specifically related to defrauding patients. These counts came back not guilty, but they were, in fact, charged, and customers testified in court in support of these charges.

Correct, it is all about what they have a paper trail for. It is also very difficult to prove harm to patients. Any prosecution would depend on a lot of statistics and scientific detective work, which the prosecutors frankly aren&#x27;t equipped to take on.Theranos tests gave some inaccurate results, but the defense will say Traditional blood tests can be wrong as well. This devolves into statistical evaluation of the methods used for testing, e.g. if the standard test is 99.9 what was the Theranos result?This is a huge mess, and why the pragmatic charge was financial fraud.

They weren&#x27;t really being charged with the stuff about patients, in part I think because the communication between Holmes and investors was direct, whereas Holmes was not personally communicating with the patients. Basically, the prosecutors went for the charges that were easier to prove.If Theranos still existed as a company, it would doubtless be getting buried under a blizzard of charges relating to how Theranos, the company, treated their patients. One of several reasons why Theranos the company no longer exists.

Eh, what seems easiest to prove gets prosecuted. Like mob bosses getting convicted of tax evasion.The lies to patients and investors were quite well linked anyway, if you want to think about it like that.

My guess about the discrepancy is that the lies she told investors were more brazen and came directly from her own mouth. She told investors and journalists that Theranos was working on military contracts (no such contracts ever existed), and she straight up told investors that no third party testing was involved in Theranos test results (a lie). She directly ordered employees to omit positive test results from investors&#x27; blood tests because she didn&#x27;t have confidence in the results. This is all documented and she has admitted to much of it.The lies told to patients and fraudulent test results could be (and were) denied by saying she wasn&#x27;t aware of what was happening in the labs.It&#x27;s not that investors are more important in the eyes of the law or that patients weren&#x27;t lied to, it&#x27;s about the quality of the evidence available. Her not guilty verdicts do not mean she&#x27;s innocent, simply that there wasn&#x27;t enough evidence available to convince a jury.

Those patients might have standing to file a civil class action suit against Holmes. Not sure if she has enough assets left to make that worthwhile.

I agree with everything you said, but I think the person you&#x27;re replying to is less upset at the prosecutors&#x2F;jury, and more upset about the laws in the first place. They protect the rich and powerful, and don&#x27;t worry about the average person getting hurt.

From what I&#x27;ve read, patients were prevented from testifying about the impact of the damage caused by the incorrect test results.  That means life-changing pain and suffering was concealed from the jury.

It&#x27;s not particularly surprising, if you assume that the jury was essentially looking for a specific, traceable line between representations from Elizabeth Holmes herself (and nobody else) and the subsequent payment as a necessary element of fraud. (Whether or not the jury was doing so could be guessed from reading the jury instructions, which I haven&#x27;t done).Being found guilty of defrauding investors in that light is easy because Holmes did specific acts, such as basically saying &quot;we&#x27;re endorsed by $BIG_PHARMA&quot; knowing that they weren&#x27;t, as part of her investor pitch--that&#x27;s a pretty unambiguous traceable injury. But tracing anything she herself said to getting a random schmoe on the street to take a blood test... again, if you think fraud requires that specific act, it&#x27;s not hard to see why someone would vote not guilty there.Of course, I would still have liked to see her proclaimed guilty on fraud for the test results. But as abhorrent as her actions may have been, they may not have necessarily climbed the bar into illegality.

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it&#x27;s why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans.But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren&#x27;t giving false-negatives or false-positives, they were using lab techniques that we have known to be inaccurate for decades. She knowingly sold Walgreens on 1 test, and then performed a different test.I need to sit down and properly inform myself about how the prosecutors fucked that up so badly.

Elizabeth Holmes found guilty