That investors may have been foolish and greedy does not take away from the fact that Holmes acted to deceive them.

If I leave the keys in the ignition of my sports car and it’s stolen, I’m a very foolish person, but certainly no less the victim of a car theft.

the problem - this became an institutionalized modus operandi of Silicon Valley, finance, higher education, IP law, crypto, even real estate - essentially the entire economy of intangible goods and services. As Jim Chanos put in ‘We are in the golden age of fraud’ - lying to investors, public or congress or courts became so normalized that people no longer see any problem with it

Except that the investors gave the keys of their cars to Holmes. Holmes didn't grab their money without their permission.

Mine certainly does

Lot of companies do that atleast with software. Didnt Bill Gates tell IBM that they have an OS when they didnt and then bought an OS from someone else?

However, the software people rarely try to gaslight you into believing that the features actually do exist and you don't need them anyway. At least, in my experience. And, when pressed by customers, they usually fess up that the features are still "under development".

Listening to the "The Dropout" podcast, the thing that is striking is that Theranos had a bunch of things they said to investors and customers (Walgreens, Safeway) that they would not fess up to in deposition before the SEC. All of a sudden, the genius founder can't remember hardly anything of what happened in the last 10 years.

I don't doubt that Holmes wanted it to work. I think she thought that in the first few years, her R&D lab would actually be producing a machine that did what they claimed, and that they'd just be running the tests in house until the FDA approval came to sell them to everyone and his dog. But it seems she and the other brass didn't want to ever hear that they were not succeeding. And so they had to lie.

I was pretty disappointed because the articles about it made it seem like she had made or been part of a breakthrough in her undergraduate research to dramatically reduce the sample size. Imagine the applications in veterinary medicine! But this was not the case, she took existing tech and then started raising investment on the promise that it could be extended by sufficiently smart people, and then sold an image of herself as a prodigy to keep the ball rolling, while immunizing herself to the reality of the actual performance of the machines.

The big difference is she didn't have anything and no viable path to deliver it. A fundamental step had to be made which wasn't there. It is like promising anti gravity flight. If you have a functioning anti gravity Prototyp you can probably make a plane with enough engineering. If you don't it will not happen no matter how much money you pour in.

Looks more like she "messed with the wrong mf'ers" as they say. Tbf, $1 billion is a lot of money.

You could say the same thing about any fraud victims, especially love scams[1].

[1]"Police statistics show more than 75 per cent of people caught up in online romance scams refuse to believe they're being ripped off." https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/online-love-fraud-v...

someone falling for a romance scam is simply inexperienced in that matter, and should not be expected to know better

there is also a big difference between loosing your life savings and a failed investment, given that the majority of investments fail anyways.

People that fall for romance scams tend to be older and significantly more experienced (in terms of life and love) than people who don't. They also continue with the relationship even when friends, family and eventually law enforcement sit down with them and show them that it's a scam.

I think many of these scams really highlight our innate desire to fool ourselves, especially when we are desperate and hopeful.

i doubt that older people are more experienced.

being married for a decade or two does nothing to prepare you for an online relationship.

older people likely never had an online relationship before and also weren't switching partners as often when they were young as people nowadays tend to. if they were they should have less trouble finding a new partner.

they are falling for online relationships precisely because they don't know how to find a partner otherwise.

but that isn't even the issue.

i don't know if i could tell the difference between a genuine relationship and a well executed pretender. not meeting in person makes it really hard to verify the claims being made.

what is puzzling is why someone would give up their life savings for someone they haven't even meet yet in person.

some expensive gifts for a few thousand dollars, sure, but all i have? that's something i'd bring into a marriage and only use if it is really needed. but then, i am a skeptic by nature.

Same goes for SpaceX's point to point travel. It will never happen and there are many warning signs pointing to this fact. For example in their presentation they list a large list of cities, many of those are completely out of the question. So in essence a blatant lie.

Sure SpaceX probably wont go under because they have some real projects but it is quite questionable for a company to make such claims knowing it will never meet them.

Maybe I am wrong but such announcements which clearly will never happen are just PR, like Ryanair announcing every couple of years that they either charge for toilets or remove the seats, both which will probably not happen in any near future but it gives them free press coverage.

So what were the warning signs before investors invested?

These announcements go beyond PR, they are borderline fraud.