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A comment on The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage. Parent comment

Re:The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with i... by Aerroon on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:38AM (#33463946)
I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible.

It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.

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Re:The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with i... by paulgb on Friday November 04, 2022 @06:40AM (#33464451)
Theranos scammed wealthy investors but also hurt a lot of other people in the process, namely patients who received bad tests and employees who have a black mark on their resume.

In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs.

It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.

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Re:The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with i... by astrange on Friday November 04, 2022 @06:41AM (#33464459)
Remember Theranos wasn't even big tech, and only had one major Silicon Valley investor in it; they were a fake big tech company attracting people who wanted to be SV but weren't. The usual VCs didn't even trust them!
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Re:The New York Times made a weird editorial decision with i... by pencilguin on Friday November 04, 2022 @11:21AM (#33468224)
Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.)

Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups.

BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.

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