The points I'm making here are positive, not normative.

I imagine there's some calculus to be done here.

The impact of a mea culpa on sentencing would likely be minimal in the grand scheme of things. I think (for one) she's pathological - as I pointed out in another comment you'd have to be to screw over people like Henry Kissinger and four star Marine Corp general James Mattis who's nickname is actually "Mad Dog". Scary.

Secondly, her post-prison career opportunities are much better if she goes to her grave never admitting or acknowledging any fault or wrongdoing. She still has plenty of fans and true believers. I was interviewing an attorney (of all things) once and she said "All Elizabeth Holmes did was the same thing men do and get away with everyday". Needless to say I didn't hire her.

I don't know if there are any "Son of Sam" laws that apply here but I can definitely see her having a very prosperous career at 50 hitting the speaking circuit, book deal, podcast, whatever capitalizing in 2033 would look like.

This is a tangent, but...does she deserve every bit of 11 years?

I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.

I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.

It is indeed a long time and a fair thing to bring up. Without getting into a philosophical discussion about sentences in general though, I think it's fair to point out that she ran a fraudulent company for well over 11 years, benefiting personally and financially from it all, while knowingly doing so, lying, and whatever else. She fired an employee who tried to warn fairly early about her lies, who later committed suicide. She hired investigators to follow Tyler Shultz around and bullied him with lawsuits.

These and more actions of hers do make me personally feel okay with her sentencing, especially since she shows zero remorse. Her final words before sentencing were basically "I'm sorry I ran a failed startup".

Yes, but at the same time, she defrauded her investors for billions, and, as was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, appears to be completely and totally unrepentant. Her position is that Theranos was just a failed startup and that, essentially, she's being punished because she ran out of runway. Whereas, in reality, Theranos didn't work, and, according to its own scientists, could never have worked. It was snake oil from beginning to end.

I don't think 11 years is an unjust sentence for that.

She earns the 11 years through the damage caused to people who used her fraudulent product.

Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.

First part ok, second part wtf

She wasn’t prosecuted for that though.

> Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.

No, it's not OK and it's not all risk/reward. The risk is whether the product can succeed and be better than others' products/services - not whether the company you're investing in is a fraud - that's what the legal system tries to prevent.

Here’s what confuses me about this. The entire SV culture is have an idea, build a prototype, demo it (whether it works or is just a UI doesn’t not matter because you want to validate the product). Then get capital and go all in on making it work. Now this being a medtech product with heavy research, I am not surprised many things were not working and more engineering/scientist hours were needed. I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone, I do believe she ran out of runway before her breakthrough and because no more VC capital was available there was not a clear path forward and people lost faith in her. I mean what was the endgame? So be in research mode forever?

Obviously I don’t condone her unhinged behavior of stalking and threatening whistleblowers, but that should not all amount to 11 years. It will absolutely make any similar startup too risky and they will not find any capital.

You can't defraud people while you seek the end of your RnD journey. In order to finance this search, she committed fraud and completely misrepresented the state of her efforts. Based on her lies, people gave her money to continue her development efforts. There is no excuse for this.

> I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone

we very much disagree here.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is not nearly as gray an area as you think. Have you ever read an IPO prospectus or a quarterly report from a publicly traded company? They include big lists of risks that can all threaten the performance of the company. Those are there because you have to be truthful with your investors. If you lie to raise money, that's fraud. If it doesn't actually already work and you tell them it does, it's a problem.

What I think in this case is that it's a pity that she wasn't prosecuted for threatening people's health with unreliable test results. They didn't "run out of runway" while in research mode: they were already selling a defective product that is safety-critical. Google Jean-Louis Gasse's piece on his personal experience with Theranos results. It was incredibly callous to gamble with people's lives that way. I do understand that it was easier to prosecute the financial crimes, but it's still unsatisfying that they were not held to account on those actions.

You have never been able to outright lie to your investors and nobody faces the risk of following in Elizabeth's footsteps save for those who faced with a losing technology choose to simply lie to their users and investors. You are as much at risk of meeting that fate as you are "risk" of finding yourself in a bank with a gun and a ski mask. If you find yourself outside the bank loading your gun then simply remove the ski mask, place the gun in your glove compartment, and go home.

In medicine you are indeed expected to stay in research mode forever until you have something that provably works. None of this is controversial or complicated.

The investors angle, especially the very early ones, still puzzle me. My only experience with medical labs comes from family. Back the day, when Theranos was hottest thing under the sun, I asked my mom, medical lab tech, about it. Her answer was, I paraphrase, "no way, you need way bigger blood samples for one of the tests if you want proper results". Followed something along the lines of who is providing oversight of the labs and making test equipement is properly callibarted. In Germany, local authoroties do just that.

So, I always wondered, if a lab technician needs a mere glance on the sales pitch to have doubts, how could investors miss it during even the most superficial due dilligence? Or did they catch it, and just say fuck it, we can still dump it through an IPO?

And those celebrities going on its board, was the money so good and the hype so blinding?

In the US there are also authorities making sure (especially medical) machines are in good order. Perhaps the investors trusted the authorities?

they had some big issues with their labs compliance if i remember correctly

> I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.

I generally agree, but when your fraud is in the hundreds of millions and billions range, well, that's more than most people will earn in a hundred lifetimes.

I think to me it depends very much on who is losing the money. If you defraud Musk of 1B of his money, that represents less than 1/100th of his wealth and is completely irrelevant.

If you defraud 500K people of all their $2K in savings, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you.

Oddly enough I think the justice system is set up to function the other way around.

What makes it set up to function the other way round?

It's far too little.

I can't get too upset about the investors; they had the opportunity to do their own due diligence and chose not too.

She lied to patients, subverting systems meant to protect people against fraudulent medical care and faking blood test results. This wasn't a game. The punishment for cavalierly toying with people's health was far too lenient.

She earned 25 years or more not just on the merits, but as an example to the next person who decides to make money with fake medical treatments.

As long as we're locking up druggies who never hurt anybody but themselves for that long, we should be doing the same thing to frauds like her.

my concern is that things like this only get prosecuted hard when the victims are themselves filthy rich. I suppose we'll see what happens with sbf...

We’re not: https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-off...

> After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison

Why do two wrongs make a right here?

Because if you don't hold rich people accountable to the same laws as poor people then nothing will ever change.

So if she was poor you'd prefer she got a more lenient sentence?

Yes

I have friends that have faced longer prison sentences for a couple bags of weed in their backpacks. she, her lawyers, and her “previous trauma” get no sympathy from me.

The sentence for your friends was excessive, cruel and unfair. That doesn't stop the fact that 9 years (counting maximum 500 days reduction for good behavior) is a very long time.

I know someone who went to prison 25 years for selling drugs out of a brick and mortar store. He clearly sold a lot. But I don’t understand how sentencing for that is fair in comparison to Elizabeth. Feels like Elizabeth did waaay more damage for way longer. Guess just better lawyers?

Why the sympathy for these white collar criminals that have ruined lives in numbers comparable to crimes that we lock other people up for decades for committing?

In general, I'm not convinced in long sentences, I don't believe they deter crime nor do I believe they help criminals become productive members of society especially given the current state of prisons in most countries. I think that locking up people for decades should only be considered when there's a very real risk of major crime (murder, sexual assault, etc.. ) if the criminal is released. So the sympathy on my part is not only for white collar criminals, it's for the imprisoned.

Wow, that's truly insane.

What state?

Can you imagine giving up your life because your blood test results were completely wrong?

If you knew that they were wrong, and you still recommended others to make life-or-death decisions based on them?

Yes. For corporate murder.

She sold fraudulent medical tests that were widely deployed and people made medical decisions based on those fraudulent tests. For instance in AZ alone this effected 175,940 consumers.

https://fortune.com/2022/01/04/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-hum...

Statistically some of those consumers suffered worse outcomes and others died although the link between those outcomes and Theranos is hard to prove in the individual cases. If you throw bricks off of a skyscraper at the street below without looking you are trying to kill "people" even if you never saw any of your eventual victims. She is being punished for the financial aspect of the affair according to those standards but we shouldn't forget the other aspect.

If she was given one day for each person she defrauded of their health not their money she would be in prison for life which to my thinking is equitable. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. 11 years isn't even enough.

> I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.

Then don't commit one of the most notable frauds of the 21st century? It seems to me that avoiding this fate you so rightfully fear is incredibly simple and anybody who therefore fails to restrain themselves from doing so has earned every second of their sentence.

"To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes."

I wouldn't be surprised if her pregnancies were calculated to try to gain leniency. Otherwise it's pretty selfish to have kids knowing you could be in prison for most of their childhood.