I beg to differ. Straight from the article:
> Some patients were rushed to a hospital on the basis of erroneous readings, only to be sent home when their blood was properly analyzed by the hospital. Even worse, Theranos was using brutal intimidation tactics against its own employees to stop the truth from coming out.
I don't know about your location but American citizens pay quite a premium for hospital care. Imagine the potential for crippling debt all because of a test result which should have been known to produce false positives.
That's definitely the public losing money here.
When Stanford Professor John Ioannidis refuses to join your board because he refuses to give your product credibility that is a HUGE red flag.
This is a long way of saying that we may have created too many disincentives for large companies to IPO.
If you invest 100M you might as well throw another 10k at a prediction market if you're confident in yours and there are naysayers who would bet against you.
This is not the most amazing thing, at all. I'm not surprised that "the media" with their limited access, didn't get the full story.
Rather, I'm more surprised about the informed investors, who invested a lot of money, and had access or at least the ability to push for it. How did they invest so much money in something with seemingly so little backing?
> These incidents ought to remind us the exponentially important role media plays in our lives and how important it is that we come up with a framework to penalize misleading journalism, while at the same time, preserving the independence of media.
I don't disagree with the sentiment about the media, but I think this is a singularly bad example - who cares what the public thought about Theranos - the public didn't lose money here.