All of those listed were well executed financial frauds. I don't think successful people are particularly more likely to fall for scams - they just have the necessary capital/disposable income and are targeted by more sophisticated scammers.

I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NLP and various "success hacking" fads etc.

The answer there might be that in reality successful people are not really very different from unsuccessful ones, and have very little control over the contingencies and luck that put them onto their respective paths. This is certainly the case with financial success.

I mean, define “well executed”. Theranos, in particular, it’s notable that very little of their money came from _conventional_ sources (traditional VCs, sovereign wealth funds etc). It was largely, essentially, _personal_ investment by stupid rich people; often via a family office, but ultimately at the direction of the stupid rich person. IIRC one attempt by Theranos to get investment from a real VC collapsed because they _could not provide audited accounts_. Like, they didn’t even have a fake set, they were not providing them to their investors _at all_.

I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.

As a "poor" person by Madoff investor standards, I am paranoid of any investment where I don't know what it is invested in. That said the other side are people who invested with the guy who bet against the CDS crap in 2008 (sorry forget his name), who I think were also in the "trust a guy with my money" camp. So I can see why people do it. But I would diversify, maybe max 10% in any one fund that is a black box, maybe max 40% in black boxes in total. Assuming you are rich - maybe 10% for most of us.

I have one that I think is worst than all of them. CloudKitchen.