Bad Blood Book Theranos

From the Slope of Hope:
At the risk of getting all Holden Caulfield-y on you, I really hate phony. Anything fake or phony drives me to distraction. Dyed hair. Insincere compliments. Ulterior motives. Plastic surgery. Anyone or anything constructing a facade just rubs me the wrong way.
And that is the principal reason I have written so many posts about Theranos (this is my eleventh one) even though it was never a public company and there's nothing to chart about it. Some have even wondered out loud if I'm obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes. Far from it. First off, take my word for it, she isn't my type, and secondly, I don't get all tingly about baritone-voiced business criminals. Never been a turn-on. Honest.
I was prompted to write this post since John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood is coming out next month. John is the multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who brought down the company through his thorough, diligent investigative reporting, and scumbug Holmes (while Theranos still had hundreds of employees) led her entire organization into a cheer "Fuck Carreyrou! Fuck Carreyrou!" over and over again when his story hit the stands. A shameless charlatan like Elizabeth Holmes is naturally going to lead her followers with such Nuremberg-style rallies in order to counteract the forces of the truth.
In case by some chance you missed my first ten posts about Theranos, here's a blurb about the book which will help catch you up:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

The book isn't out yet, but a handful of folks have advance copies, and here are a few tidbits that are reportedly in it:

+ Elizabeth Holmes was 19 when she started the company, and in the early days of the company, she and her partner in crime Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani were - - what's the euphemism these days? - - oh, yeah, "dating". I don't want to imagine these two in coitus, particularly since he was more than double her age. Yuck.

+ One employee took the time and trouble to create a Space Invaders-like arcade game in which Mr. Carreyrou was the object to be destroyed. This shows the twisted mentality of the salaried employees in the organization although, let's face it, this was the ONE working product that emerged from the $700 million invested into this fiasco.

+ According to StatNews.com, in the book it reveals for the first time: "Carreyrou describes a surreal scene from 2006, in which the company’s first chief financial officer learned that Theranos had deceived Novartis executives in demonstrating its technology at a pitch meeting in Switzerland. The trick: Because the blood-testing system was inconsistent in generating results, Theranos staffers had recorded a result from one of the times it worked to display in the demonstration. And when the CFO raised concern about that with Holmes? He was fired on the spot."

+ As Theranos senior executives were trying to scam companies like Novartis into pouring more money into the organization, there is one almost comic scene retold in which Holmes pricked her finger hundreds of times in a hotel room before a key meeting in a clumsy effort to get the faulty technology to actually function.

+ In a shameless example of nepotism, Elizabeth hired her younger brother Christian (oh, the irony........) to join, and he, in turn, got jobs for a bunch of his frat brothers. They were collectively known as the "Therabros", and I suspect their main function at the organization was the enjoy direct deposit of their inflated salaries and make copious use of Friday beer fetes. Below are the lovely siblings at a state dinner at the White House:

+ Tim Draper, the first investor in the company, defiantly claimed the innocence of Holmes (to this very day, I assume). Last year he went on a media rant about how there was a "conspiracy" to take her down. “Well, they first say: ‘There’s a great woman entrepreneur and she's on the cover of Forbes. Let's see what we can do to take her down,’” Draper explained. So - - umm - - it's basically because she's a woman that the world is so mean to her. I would counter that the fact she's a woman is the ONLY reason she isn't in prison at this very moment. Sort of like - - just to grab an example - - Hillary. Here's an image of the shy, self-effacing Tim Draper, who probably at this very moment is thinking about the importance of opportunities for women-folk in technology.

+ Oh, and going back to my dislike of "fake", the book also reveals that her ridiculously deep voice is an affectation, and that her actual voice is several octaves higher. That makes a lot of sense, because if you've ever seen a video of her speaking, what comes out of her mouth sounds completely alien.

+ There's much, much more, of course, including the tale of the sad, sorry, son of a bitch who killed himself because he couldn't bear the guilty of the fraud any longer. For him, suicide was better than facing the wrath of Elizabeth Holmes.

As for Holmes - - her blonde hair is fake - - her deep voice is fake - - her technology is fake - - it seems the only thing that's real is the $700 million that her unsuspecting investors lost by getting duped in this elaborate scheme.
The fact that Holmes and her much older, umm, "date" Sunny Balwani were able to get away with something so blatant for so long is a combination of (a) bull market mentality, in which people look the other way and (b) the old white men on her board of directors like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis who didn't know shit about blood analysis technology but probably liked staring at Holmes' ass during presentations.

Suffice it to say, although I personally have not been harmed one iota by anything Theranos ever did, I hope Holmes and Balwani both wind up being thrown into prison. And that's all I've got to say about that.

Crazy Eyes is BACK!

Mass fraud, thousands of dead people, and a missing 10 billion dollars doesn't seem to put any kind of dent into the train wreck of Elizabeth Holmes and her satanic cronies...

From the Slope of Hope: I saw a headline on December 24 which put a damper on my Christmas Eve:

Ummm - - so why on earth would this bug me? I don't have a dog in this fight. If Theranos goes bankrupt, it doesn't hurt or help me one bit. If they become the most valuable company in the world (ha!), the situation is the same. Utterly neutral and meaningless. So why should I care?

I've been pondering my reaction. Theranos is no stranger to the Slope of Hope, as I've written about this train wreck at length on eight separate occasions. For most of 2017, I wondered what had happened to them, because the media went completely silent on them. Ms. Holmes' own Twitter account hasn't issued a tweet for over two years (!), and every time I drive by the gorgeous Theranos headquarters here in Palo Alto, I see a completely empty parking lot. So I figured she basically got away with raising $900 million and having a ruined company without any consequence. But it seems I was wrong.

With the $100,000,000 that Fortress Investment is inexplicably throwing at Theranos, the company has now raised a billion bucks. I figure Holmes must have some SERIOUS dirt on somebody, because nothing about this makes any sense at all. Yes, yes, I realize her board of directors used to have every deep state slimeball imaginable, so maybe that helps, but let's face it, the Theranos name is mud. I would wager its brand has NEGATIVE value. If you were starting a brand new medical device company, and you could give it the Theranos name for, say, ten dollars, would you do it? Yeah, I didn't think so.

So, again, why should I care? Well, I think part of it is this:

Holmes' whole schtick was how she was the reincarnation of Steve Jobs. From the bizarre diet to the black turtlenecks to the secrecy ("Hey! Our stuff doesn't work at all! Shhhhhh! Don't say anything!"), she held herself out as a younger Steve Jobs who wore a B-cup. For a while, the media gobbled it up, and they actually put her on the front cover of national magazines, repeating the claim that she was worth $4.5 billion. She - - how shall I put this? - - wasn't.

Here we see Ms. Holmes describing the $100 million as a great investment on a conference call, whose listeners couldn't detect the air quotes. Why isn't she in prison for all the dead people?

I remain floored anyone would put another dime into this place. As the recent Wall Street Journal article mentioned, "An investigation by the Journal in October 2015 sparked a wave of scrutiny about Theranos' practices, at a time when the company had a valuation of around $10 billion. Holmes has continued to lead Theranos through settling multiple lawsuits. However, investigations opened by both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are ongoing." So they are tits-deep in lawsuits and angry shareholders, both Holmes and Theranos have been banned from running labs, and their name has become synonymous with smoke and mirrors. What's going on here? Just because you throw on a white lab coat doesn't make you a genius scientist.

Turns out, Theranos little blood testing thing was all smoke and mirrors. There was no magical machine doing amazing blood tests. 99% of all test results were JUST MADE UP. When this news broke last year, the company, half a million diagnosis that left many people injured, dead, and in hospitals for surgeries they didn't need, made all this go away. Until now. The bitch is back. With another billion to play with.

Joking aside, I think for me what bugs the holy hell out of me is simply the disappointment. The past eight years have shown us an environment in which fraud, government bailouts, and crooked executives go unpunished, if not celebrated. Once in a blue moon, there's a piece of shit company which is finally exposed for what it is (other examples - - Color.com and Clinkle.com) and blow up in front of our eyes. We saw that with Theranos, and even though their success or failure doesn't affect my life one iota, it gave me some minuscule degree of satisfaction that there was still a little bit of judgment, discernment, and fairness to the world.

So when Theranos had an H-bomb dropped on them, and Holmes disappeared from the press, and their parking lot went empty, and their office space went up for least, I thought to myself: there's still a little bit of sense left out there. But I was wrong. There isn't. And if you're a mildly-attractive slender blonde with some razzle-dazzle and the right connections, you can get away with just about anything.

When she was on magazine covers and blitzing with interviews, I never heard a single coherent sentence out of her.  Every question she droned on with empty memes like "access".   She rambled without ending so interviewers would cut in for the next question.

In high school, she earned average grades.  She was on the track team, and she was lapped so badly by everyone else that they had to announce the race was not finished and to stay off the track so she could finish.  That means she never went to practice.

However, that laughable performance was twisted into some big character plus, her "will" being so strong she could actually stay in and finish the race two laps behind the field, what a competitor!
Her father was CIA.  Why do you think Kissenger and all the other elite insiders were on her board?  That is how she got into Stanford, on their CIA "International" program that sent her to China and she flunked out.

Not dropped out.  Flunked out.  She's stupid.  A moron by comparison to Stanford students that have to make SAT and GPA minimums. 

Because the CIA owns so much of the media, they blew her up into the next Steve Jobs as she did nothing more than dress like him and talk in a deep voice.

You know how many people came forward that knew her, the fake voice was so over-the-top.  People came forward to say she flunked introductory courses.  People came forward to say how lazy she was.
She was boffing an Indian millionaire while overseas.  Everyone around her knew what a stupid, corrupt whore she was.  But the CIA is so dominant in American affairs now, and this little PC narrative so important to them - oh look, a woman "genius".  See how women are just the same as men. 

The important question is why.  How could she become worth $9 billion and MILLIONS of fake lab tests be conducted, hundreds of millions in one retailer setting up Health Centers without a working prototype of the machine?

Answer:  CIA. 

SRA victim. It's all in the eyes.