... which is actually a completely reasonable assumption from her perspective.
People at her level of power being held accountable is the one-in-a-thousand exception. It almost never happens. In a very real sense, she was just extremely unlucky, and had undoubtedly witnessed countless others commit worse crimes without any negative consequences for them.
This is also the answer to questions like "How did those cops think they could get away with murdering a man in cold blood while being filmed by half a dozen cameras?" It's easy: Because they had seen others get away with it, time and time again. Statistically speaking, a cop murdering an innocent citizen has about as much to fear as a regular guy parking in the wrong spot. Indictments are not the rule, never mind convictions.
I think a surprising amount of people try it. But every SEC indictment is not news so we don't hear about the people who go to prison.
But you rarely hear about the ones that tried it and got away with it, because they got away with it.
However there're also other ways to control others to solve problems involuntarily.
Exploitation is the area in which the civilization is exceptionally strong.
So yes, starting from some level of money and power it's pretty easy to get away with proportinally more and more with the money and power increase.
The power/money creates a inbalance with the punishment ( it has less side effects to do it). Either by people being influenced of your status or the fine not being relational to your wealth.
Untill you overdo it, which may be the situation with the previous president.
The standard process for many decades now is that a company caught committing crimes pays a certain amount of money (nowhere near enough to threaten its existence in any way), and then can continue operating essentially as before.
Same as Theranos. It was fraud.
It is a massive mistake to conflate stuff regular companies do which may be illegal or distasteful, with companies that are entirely fraudulent.
How is that different from what Theranos did? Theranos fraudulently claimed their blood test was capable of quantifying various factors. It wasn't. Volkswagen fraudulently claimed their cars were capable of meeting emissions standards. They weren't.
Yet Volkswagen is still allowed to operate, even though their business ran on fraud for a long time.
VW has other products than their diesel cars. Theranos had nothing but the non-functioning diagnostic.
This isn't true. Read The Smartest Guys in the Room. Enron started out as a real company and slowly became increasingly fraudulent with time.
Besides, it's impossible that Holmes crimes wouldn't ever be discovered. I commented elsewhere, but the technology Theranos was selling was simply impossible - capillary blood at very small volumes is simply not homogeneous enough to give accurate results for quantitative tests. Holmes jumped off a cliff without a parachute and thought that if she gave enough glowing interviews to credulous news outlets that she could somehow keep from hitting the ground.
She has not been convicted for defrauding customers/patients or her employees.
Tells much about current state of justice system… Well at least she was stopped.
In a court of law you need to prove your case, with evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence that Holmes lied to investors for the purposes of getting money, and that she knew she was lying and did it purposefully, was undeniable - there were too many smoking guns. The evidence that she knew she was defrauding patients was always less clear cut.
Besides, the prosecutors did try mightily to convict her of crimes against patients. Are you saying the 12 randomly selected jurors who found her not guilty of these crimes are in cahoots with "the current state of the justice system"?
how would that have worked? it was a fraud before then.
> Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly told a Walgreens consultant that “They don’t put pretty people like me in jail,” according to a government filing ahead of the sentencing hearing Friday.
The arrogance.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-sentencing...
A similar story: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84phU8of02U
Holmes, unlike most nonviolent corporate psychopaths, is only going to jail because she violated one of the only real cardinal rules of late stage capitalism, which is don’t intentionally defraud investors. She’s also one of the few psychopaths dumb enough to publicly and directly admit that she was maintaining a charade of a person who believes that other people and their emotions truly exist.
Source?
Holmes is a textbook psychopath, i.e. "deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/
The complete lack of empathy or concern for her victims, contrition or anything is amazing to watch.
This lack of belief that she would ever be found out or anyone would care about her lack of concern for people was her downfall. She could have just bailed out before the Walgreens deal when the whole thing was obviously not going to work and failed in the normal way that science project startups fail. She could have then married the rich guy and had the two kids and lived a dull life maybe selling diet pills or whatever, but she just had to go all in to the fraud and wreck her life because she thought she could just power through on delusional belief alone.