It doesn’t have to do with her wealth (although that does give her better lawyers). The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). (see edit below)
What would be unusual is for the charges to be reduced or even dropped. But, as it stands, she’s facing 20 years in prison. Possibly more after this incident.
EDIT: I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t be allowed to get married post-conviction. I was saying that, even if the right to marriage was removed when convicted, she’s still not convicted.
> And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused).
That's wrong; getting married while awaiting trial is allowed in the same way that getting married before being charged is allowed, and getting married after being convicted is allowed.
The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
(see my edit about my wording re: getting married)
> The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.
I think that the surprise here was more about the financials than the morals. Depending on state, after you marry you become liable for your partners debts, and the property you came into the marriage with may become common property that can be siezed to pay them.
So if she gets fined or successfully sued, the husband could find himself with a wife he can't see for 20 years and a big line of creditors taking all his assets and future earnings.
At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.
Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.
Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.
I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.
It's actually very common for women professionals to use a lower register when speaking to colleagues. People take them more seriously; they notice. I have several friends who do this.
I read that book. I came across that Boies fellow at other times, too. SCO vs IBM. But also while reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (about Harvey Weinstein).
Psychopathy is not limited to serial killers. Psychopathy is prevalent in about 1 in 100. If 1/100 people were serial killers, we'd have a big problem on our hands.
In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.
Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population.
The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
I imagine we do hear about more such cases because there simply are more of them compared to other groups we hear about.
There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.
I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.
Not the most unusual story you'll find. Carlos the Jackal got married in prison, his lawyer is his wife.
This is surprising on so many levels. He'll likely spend the rest of his life in prison. He was a ruthless killer. And his treatment of women is well documented and... not flattering.
It would be incredibly dark as a legal defense, but given her sorta sociopathy, I wonder if she has calculated that being married and having a child before sentencing would make the judge or jury give a more lenient sentence.
Tbh, even knowing that it's a 100% calculated move, I would personally as a juror have a much harder time sentencing a woman with a young child to significant prison time.
This is also a plot point in the Broadway musical (and its movie adaptation) “Chicago”. It even gets a great song, full of double entendres, “My Baby and Me”.
Spousal communication privilege usually only covers conversation from while you are married, not prior to then. Although, testimonial privilege is a whole can of worms.
> The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
I think this is one of the things I learned from Ken White on All the President's Lawyers: we read about legal system abuse here and there and it shocks us, but even the most common normal things in the criminal justice system like how long criminal trials take can be just as shocking if only you know about them.
> The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
You can demand it goes faster. In the US this is specifically the "speedy trial" provision of the Sixth Amendment. The government is obliged to provide "speedy trial" if demanded - if it can't do that it isn't entitled to a trial at all.
However, your lawyers (and she can afford good ones) will almost invariably advise you not to do that unless things have gotten entirely out of hand - because speedy trial applies to both sides, and the prosecution will have the rough outline of their case before they even file charges, so unless you're in a hurry t go to prison...
It might open up ways for her to hide away some of her ill-gotten gains. Ideally the state keeps track of it and nails her with additional punishment if she is caught trying that.
> Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial.
Slight hijack, but this is a key reason behind the movement to abolish cash bail. The thrust of the argument is essentially that people with more financial resources can pay bail. Those without those resources cannot, so the pre-trial period is often a de facto prison sentence whose length is unknown in advance. This setup obviously results in a tiered justice system.
There are ~500k people in jail who are innocent under the law. The elimination of cash bail is intended to eliminate this disparity.
The problem is that if you remove it, what do you replace it with? A judge making the decision if you’re released or jailed awaiting trial. For me, that’s fine, but for some people, that’s not (despite the judge in the current situation setting the bail amount).
<rant>
You end up with things like California’s SB-10 (thankfully overturned by Prop 25[0]) that would’ve replaced it by a risk assessment “AI” black box.[a]
[a]: SB-10 would supposedly have required “tools [that] shall be demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable”. But what science? Crime statistics says black people commit more crimes, but some claims that those numbers are the result of overpolicing. Who’s right?
I'm an engineer so this is not an area where I am an expert. But recognizing that we have a system that is openly biased against people without financial resources seems like something we should change.
I understand that DC rarely uses cash bail and has a 40+ year track record showing that 90% of accused show for their trial dates and > 90% are not re-arrested before trial. So maybe since that system seems to work for the most part, we could use that as a basis? Or at least require a very strong burden of proof before we presume people guilty because they are not wealthy?
How much better is the cash bail system at producing defendants at trial than DC's system? Is it so much better that it's worth ignoring our Constitution?
If nothing else, we spend ~$17B incarcerating innocent (again, per our law) people. Seems like an incredible waste of money and human potential. Maybe we try something else.
He was arrested in December 2015 and his trial started in June 2017. After appeals, he wasn’t sentenced until March 2018. Not exactly a speedy process.
It depends on how fast they can build a case and how good the defence is.
He just happened to have a lot of damning evidence against him and a pretty shit defence team, coupled with a shit PR problem in all media outlets, which made his case a toss-in.
Corporate trials always take a long time because of the a) the amount of evidence created at a corporation of any reasonable size is huge, b) rich people can afford good lawyers who can gum up any process and c) the laws are written such that the person actually knew/participated in whatever crime they're being charged with. (A) and then (C) is where a lot of time can be wasted and if the executive was being crafty about 'not knowing' and only getting the good news officially it can be tricky to prove they actually knew they were lying.
The wheels of justice move slow. The timelines of their cases aren’t that different and Holmes’s case is both clear-cut and amazingly complex. Aaron was arrested in Jan 2011 and died Jan 2013 before his trial started and after being offered a plea deal of 6 month in low security. His trial never started and I can’t find if it was ever scheduled when I do a google search. Holmes was arrested in June 2018 and her trial was originally scheduled for March 2021 but delayed until July. Her pre-trial hearings start in two weeks.
It is a high-profile case. Careers will be made and destroyed on the back of it. The legal team want to get their ducks in a row, because it involves government agencies and wealthy investors who will be asked a lot of inconvenient questions about their role (like "why didn't you act sooner?", "why did you invest in that company?") I think it's a mix of prudence, an overloaded justice system, and the pandemic that slow this down.
Given her station in society she is granted a measure of elite impunity... but it's not absolute. She likely won't face that harsh of a penalty when she finally goes to trial. If she got too harsh a sentence it would reflect poorly on those who supported her.
I read awhile back that there was the equivalent of sixteen million pages of evidence. There have of course been the attempts to throw it all out and Holmes has tried to play the victim; she may actually believe she is; in hopes it all lands on her business partner
which leads us to her getting married. part to maintain her lifestyle she was used to during Theranos's time at the top and part to make her more appealing to any jury and doubly so if she can get on stand pregnant. her court appearances that have pictures usually show her without makeup and fancy clothing. So the question then is, sociopath or Psychopath? Probably the former from the assumption of the victimhood
Theranos paid this company "IncRev", and their CEO Shekar Chandrasekaran, $159,000/mo to host a database for them? That's an impressive scam! I wonder if it's money laundering or paying off friends, since any mildly competent technologist in the company would laugh them out of the room.
Nothing worse than Janet Yellen getting paid $500k speaker fees to talk to Citadel and a long list of other Wall St companies she will soon be directly regulating at the treasury dept.
She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works.
This revolving door with industry and policy makers gets a very uncritical eye by the media (especially compared to other frivolous background details) and obviously by the self morality of the participant speakers themselves.
I personally hope Chandrasekaran gets in trouble for hiding evidence. But nepotism and conflicts of interest seem to be super common in the upper tiers of industry and politics, which Theranos famously surrounded themselves with, right down to their board of directors being politicians and ex generals.
>She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works.
Eh. People make these kinds of statements, but though that may be true in some cases, it isn't true in many other cases. For example, there are plenty of organizations that are flush with cash that want a political celebrity (whether it be Yellen, Hillary Clinton or Obama) to come and speak to their membership or conference without expecting anything in return other than the speech they give. Why? Because people like to be around celebrities, political or otherwise.
I attend healthcare conferences where attendees number in tens of thousands (paying hundreds per attendee to attend) and hundreds of vendors paying hundreds of thousands or millions to display and advertise their products... For that conference to shell out $500k to have Hillary Clinton do an opening speech is peanuts.
Janet Yellen was one of the most powerful people in the world. If you want Beyonce to play a private concert for your company, you'll need to fork over $1m+ per hour. Why shouldn't an equivalent rockstar in the macro world be allowed to charge similar rates?
Because Beyoncé won't be (directly) shaping policies that can benefit your company? The price isn't the problem, the conflict of interest is, even if it's just a potential one. Much more unlikely with a rockstar.
Janet Yellen isn't a powerful person because of her reputation on the speaking tour circuit. If you hire Beyonce it's because you're paying for the performance she gives. If you hire Janet Yellen, no person credibly believes it's because that hour talk she's giving is hugely valuable. It's because you want to establish connections with her to influence her in her actual job where her power comes from. It's a pretext for paying her money that, were you to turn up to her office and hand it to her at her day job, would be a bribe.
From my own personal experiences, the most you typically get with a high profile speaker is the email address of their assistant or the agent from the speakers bureau.
You can watch performances on Youtube as much as you like, with perfect sound. Most of the time, you hire in-person Beoynce for prestige. Same with Yellen.
But former Fed chairs in the past have rarely if ever gone on to other positions of political or regulatory power after their terms end. What were they paying for then under this theory?
When someone is in charge of way more money than that I think you want a sinecure for them after they leave so they don't fuck things up for you if they get restless.
Care to actually respond with some substance instead of snark? I'm genuinely curious about the Jackson Hole type of meetings. Are you saying her talks are indeed of some great value and insight, and not about access?
Thank you for responding. Yeah, I think thats fair, though I didnt understand the other poster to be saying they were changing policy, more that speakers were charging for knowledge/acess, which is a different thing.
The funny thing is that I don't actually disagree with you. The entire thesis that "paid speech equals corruption" is silly, though it may be true in some specific situations (and to further steel-man the position, the optics can be bad which can lead to citizens distrusting the motivations of the politician). I, myself, made a comment stating as such [1]. But writing comments impugning HN or HN users for having the audacity for upvoting comments, or having an opinion, lowers the discourse more than the opinion itself. There are also far worse opinions here than stating that paid speeches are corruption.
I've heard industry people tell of government contracts paying $300,000 a month to provide "support" for a WordPress site. They didn't get a single support request for over a year.
Nah, situations like that are not at all uncommon in software consulting. I’ve personally been involved with similar projects.
159,000/mo is 4 FTEs at typical consulting rates.
You need a DBA to manage the database, an developer to spin up some reports, someone to manage the project, and an ETL developer to get the data in and out?
There’s your $159,000/mo “database”.
Are there cheaper ways to do it? Of course. But that isn’t why anyone hires consultants.
None of those are really full time roles, especially the PM. Maybe 2 FTEs if they're not automating their own job as they go. IncRev also has an office in Bangalore where I'd assume a lot of that low-level stuff gets done, so your estimate of ~$225/hr, which is already too high for the U.S. average (but maybe not SV), could easily be too high by a factor of 3. And I doubt IncRev is really doing the report development, but maybe. So I'd guess you're off by a factor of 6 and Thernaos was just getting fleeced.
That entirely depends on the business environment. If they're allowed to work remote and the client is easy to work with, then it's not a full time job. If a client wants work to be on-site, demands a large number of meetings, and/or a lot of hoops to jump through, then that can quickly change. I've seen some business environments that expect consultant developers to attend 6 hours of meetings per day.
Some companies hire consultants precisely because their internal politics are so bad that they're unable to get the work done themselves.
I don't know anything about these companies at hand here, but I wouldn't scoff at these numbers alone.
If SV consultants charge more than $225/hr then nobody should hire them. I'm on a team of damn good full-stack developers and the most senior ones (10-15 years) bill out around $150/hr. I guarantee you we're better than most SV consultants at what we do (though we are a small team). I'm in the US, but not SV, so that must make the difference, but people are really stupid to be over-paying by "way more" than 50% for quality that I guarantee is no better than average.
There are consultants in the midwest charging $225/hr. The price that a consulting company can demand is only tangentially determined by the quality of the developers they have.
The people actually hiring these consultants usually don't care much about the skills of the individual developers. They're concerned mainly about resolving the issues that led them to hire those consultants in the first place. These often include things like:
1. Timeline. Can this consultant start work immediately? Do they have expertise in my tech stack, my industry, my regulatory environment, my particular business problem?
2. Politics. Does this consultant have sufficient reputation that I can use it as leverage in my internal business politics? Can this consultant navigate my company's business politics in order to further my business agenda? Can they produce the strategic documents/guidance to help me support my business goals?
3. Flexibility. Will this consultant work under terms that work for me? Will they put a consultant on a plane Monday? Or will they work remote? Are they willing to adjust the contract to meet a level of risk I find acceptable?
The process of choosing a consultant is mostly a business transaction between business professionals. The director of ACME's marketing department is typically in no position to evaluate the resumes of the proposed consulting development team. They're interested in getting their project done on time and on budget while minimizing risk. They're not stupid, they just have a wildly broader set of concerns than code quality.
Listen to “The Dropout” podcast, which chronicles Theranos’ rise and fall. I believe Holmes and Chandrasekaran were romantically involved in the past and were still close.
If you get money thrown at you by VC’s, why not throw and exorbitant amount to a good friend as well...
what makes is weirder is that theranos wasn't really testing. They were sending the samples to established labs. You could have maintained their test database in excel.
'"The reality, however, was that for one set of tests, the failure rate was 51.3 per cent. What does that mean? Prosecutors explain: “In other words, Theranos’s TT3 blood test results were so inaccurate, it was essentially a coin toss whether the patient was getting the right result. The data was devastating.”'
Slightly worse than a coin toss, even after accounting for the inherent bias in a flipped coin :-)
"51% failure rate" doesn't mean "100% accurate 49% of the time, and 50% accurate 51% of the time", it means "right 49% of the time, wrong 51% of the time" - a coin toss.
How is Theranos still functioning in any capacity whatsoever? it feels like they are the closest thing to a real life Umbrella Corporation that I can't imagine anyone would want to work for - unless they were getting paid to wrap up things and send them for depositions as a contractor.
Read this as, "Thanos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say" and thought, yea that makes sense -- Thanos would totally do that. Turns out they're not different.
I think if you destroy evidence then you not only get charged with that but also the jury is instructed to consider that evidence as indicative of guilt.
I am strongly determined to believe that justice systems around the world are either of the two:
1. Incompetent
2. Corrupt
I do not wish to accuse of either yet in this case, but this seems grossly unfair to what people like Aaron Swartz had to go through in comparison. I guess deep pockets if involved somehow have their cases either dragged on, turned away, justice never served at all. Consistently.
The two key defendants are facing up to 20 years in prison, they haven't gotten away with things. If the case has dragged on it's because, as this article shows, Theranos may have engaged in additional criminal activity destroying evidence. I also wouldn't call the justice system incompetent in this matter just because the computer forensic team could not crack the encryption used.
People seem to have a very misinformed view of our justice system. There are massive case loads, not enough qualified subject matter experts, or specialized investigators, and are generally understaffed in every way.
This holds for prosecution and defense, and the wealthy and the powerful, have the ability to sink massive resources into a court case, the best legal minds, possibly multiple of them, they generally have the ability to vastly manipulate the evidence, and generally have legal advice on what not to say, and avoid self incrimination.
On top of that, they will hammer the prosecutors office, to cross every t, and dot every i, and nail them in court if they don't. Not to mention the ability to file endless motions, continuances, etc...
So when it boils down to it, does the prosecutors office spend a massive percentage of their budget and man power on a single case, at the expense of tons of other cases that are seemingly straight forward? or do they cut them a deal.
A big case against the wealthy, has a high probability the prosecutors will fail to gain a conviction, it will have press, and losing will hurt the DA's chances for re-election.
When you break it down, the wealthy, will always have a massive advantage, they doesn't have to be any corruption, friends influencing the courts, etc... (though many have that too)
Its a battle of financial and time attrition, and the prosecutors have far less of it to dedicate to any single case, that a millionaire.
It’s generally attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, the 45th and 49th president of Peru, (1913-1914, terminated by a coup, then 1933-1939) although I haven’t been able to find good references pointing at exactly when or in what context he used the line.
Part of me hopes that the perceived worsening is just an illusion brought on by the wealth of information constantly flowing everywhere now.
That maybe the world has always been this corrupt - or sometimes much, much worse - but now it's just harder to quietly sweep such things under the rug.
Not sure how much of that is just wishful thinking.
Not trying to glorify the fraud in any way but I still wonder if she would have made it in an alternate universe where covid happened a year earlier. The optics for the regulators would be completely different and more akin to going after Elon right now.
Theranos pretended to do blood testing for chemical markers. I don't see the connection to the covid pandemic. Theranos didn't even pretend to do PCR tests that would be useful for virus detection.
I don't see the Elon connection at all? Say what you will about the man, Tesla is certainly a going concern in a way that Theranos never even got close to.
The Elon comparison is merely about being a position of relative political strength.
Pre-Covid, the narrative around drug companies was all about inflated insulin prices, the opioid epidemic manufactured by the Sackler family, and the profiteering exemplified by the likes of Martin Shkreli. The industry hadn't produced any truly high-profile successes in many years, and promising to reign in their worst excesses and get costs under control was politically popular.
Post-Covid, the drug industry are the cavalry heroically saving the day. They're no longer an attractive target for politicians looking to visibly battle the bad guys.
Theranos went on for nearly a decade before it crashed and burned. There was plenty of time.
DOJ hasn’t stopped taking on major cases and if anything the WSJ journalist who was critical in uncovering the lies and wrote the book on Theranos could have had even more time to poke around.
Plus most importantly the VCs would be putting on a lot more pressure to see something real, something they could use ASAP.
So I could see this have the complete opposite pressure you imagine.
Probably not. The morale of the story was she was good at collecting people with clout who simultaneously knew nothing about her business. Even in their earliest days, the outside was screaming "literally impossible" from all sides.
iirc, there is even a historic thread on HN where if you go back to the comments, its mostly people proving that there is almost certain fraud behind the scenes.
... they new the business was convincing enough to get a contract for blood testing with CVS, effectively lining it up to be a direct beneficiary of a not-insignificant portion of ACA funds for several years until the fraud came to the surface
in my view, holmes and the blood testing device are just the patsy/'fall guy' story - it's the higher up relations in connection with getting the CVS contracts that should be getting investigated
Im a pretty well known founder and I cant stress enough, the higher up you get the less people know whats happening holistically. Observationally I think it's a product of the fact that managers who get to the top are so dialed to the politics and daily reality of the role (its how they reached the top of the mountain), that theyre very brittle to all the other details of their world. I think this happens all the time and her cardinal sin was courting national press in a space that kills people while committing fraud.
Does that expose her new husband to financial liability from the fraud lawsuit?