The California jury in the criminal fraud case against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes says it is deadlocked on 3 of the 11 charges she faces.
The panel, comprised of eight men and four women, sent a note to the judge Monday saying they could not reach a unanimous verdict on its seventh day of deliberation to determine Holmes’ fate.
Judge Edward Davila instructed the jury to continue its deliberations.
The jury could still reach a decision on the remaining eight charges. This story is developing and will be updated.
The Theranos scandal happened long before the creation of this website. A real shame, since it’s quite the story. The short version is that Girl Genius Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford in 2003 to start Theranos, a biomedical corporation that had invented a revolutionary and disruptive new blood testing company. Like many visionary young geniuses she had started her company while still in her dorm room. That was a bit weird, because unlike tech companies which can often be started on somebodies computer a blood testing corporation is a physical entity that would appear to require a lot of startup capital. Luckily, Elizabeth Holmes was from an extremely well connected family.
Sailer:
Three years later nearly all the other outside directors on Theranos’s board are people who were introduced to the company through Shultz, now 93. They are former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist (a heart-transplant surgeon), retired U.S. Navy Adm. Gary Roughead, retired U.S. Marine Corp Gen. James Mattis, former Wells Fargo CEO and chairman Dick Kovacevich, and former Bechtel Group CEO Riley Bechtel.
Holmes, and the Theranos corporation managed to quite easily secure all the startup capital that they needed and then some, with the corporation raising $900 million dollars, and at their height being valued at 10 times that. Makes sense, they had a revolutionary new blood testing procedure that promised to shake up the $75 billion blood testing industry by requiring vastly less blood in a much quicker and less invasive procedure.
Except there was a little problem. You see Girl Genius Elizabeth Holmes hadn’t quite invented the fingertip capillary blood test method that she had claimed to invent. She had more like, how do I put it, invented the idea that being able to take a pinprick of blood from somebodies fingertip would be really great.
Hey guys, did you know that I invented a car that runs on garbage? After that I invented a trampoline that is so springy that it makes the Space Shuttle unnecessary for going to the moon. In the same day I invented a computer that works 10,000 times faster than our current computers. Seconds later I invented a drug that cures all cancer. I came with the idea that those products would be super awesome, so all that’s left for these products to come to market is some boring and fussy engineering implementation details.
And yet all this broad invented was some boring blood testing stuff. Please. I invented 10 times more than that as a child.
The ROK article on her contains some real gems. It also takes me back to way back in the day when I used to read that site.
Holmes is a child prodigy who, while living abroad at age 9, claims to have sold C++ compilers to Chinese customers (citation needed), and also got the privilege of working at the Genome Institute in Singapore the summer after her freshman year at Stanford, since she speaks Mandarin, they say.
LMFAO at somebody claiming to have made C++ compilers at age 9 that are so great that they can compete with even pre-existing free solutions. She would be the child tech prodigy of the century if it actually happened, yet it’s just treated as a single sentence throwaway line here.
It ought to be a classic example of making up an insane lie that nobody reasonable could believe. And yet, was swallowed up by the privileged class dipshits who gave her funding.
Whether or not she speaks any Mandarin (props to anyone who can find a clip of her doing so), the gleeful writers trumpeting this grrl power accomplishmentneglected to realize that Singapore’s native language is English, not Chinese. Even theGenome Institute web site is English-only, and none of the student programs require Chinese language. Because Holmes is a Silicon Valley fixture with a Chinese connection, she’s recently been paraded around as America’s answer to Jack Ma.
In reality, she quits school at 19 years old to run a medical technology startup in several areas where PhDs spend decades researching just one aspect of each, and we are supposed to accept the fact that she’s got it all figured out, just like that? Got it.
The sheer delusion of these people. That some 19 year old girl could have some ultra-revolutionary insight into a well established field beggared belief. And she wasn’t even going to school for Biology, only computer science.
She would also put on an unnaturally deep voice, which she used to provide herself with more gravitas. Here she can be seen forgetting to fake her unnaturally deep female baritone.
Her Chief Scientist, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide in 2013 the night before he was required to testify in a lawsuit about the company’s technology. It was made public knowledge by his wife that he had confided to her that “nothing at Theranos works.” This apparently did not immediately destroy the company.
The Elizabeth Holmes story is a fantastic example of how utterly controlled Hollywood really is. The story has everything. Fraud on an industrial scale, high tech shenanigans, secretaries of state, suicides, courtroom drama. But because it goes against Harvey Weinstein’s narratives it will not be made. Instead you goyim will get garbage like this.
But perhaps the Elizabeth Holmes’ reality distortion field was so strong that all the venture capitalists and famous board members backing her never noticed that she actually wasn’t a genius biotech inventor? Or did it have something to do with everybody who was anybody getting too invested in the idea that it was time for Silicon Valley to have a female Steve Jobs (she wears black turtlenecks like Jobs) to notice?
P.S., Back in October, Holmes was named to the Board of Trustees of the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Anyway, we finally come to her trial.
Holmes, 37, was charged by federal prosecutors with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud over allegations that she deceived investors and patients with her company’s failed blood-testing technology. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Holmes pleaded not guilty to all charges and took to the stand to defend herself during the trial, where she admitted to having regrets but denied defrauding anyone.
She also placed blamed on her former boyfriend and ex-Theranos Chief Operating Officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani for allegedly misleading her about the effectiveness of Theranos’ technology, and she accused him of emotional and sexual abuse.
Balwani faces his own trial next year over his alleged role in defrauding the company’s stakeholders.
By all accounts, Ramesh Balwani was a blowhard idiot who was manipulated by Holmes, and not the other way around. It fits with Holmes’ character. There’s no question that she was an excellent manipulator and saleswoman who managed to charm at least some privileged class dipshits at cocktail parties that you aren’t invited to. It’s a narrative that Steve Sailer takes as granted.
Sailer:
The Theranos fiasco is a reminder that There Is No Inner Party that actually understands what’s going on. Holmes recruited a whole bunch of retired Secretaries of State and past or future Defense Secretaries and got investments from insiders like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, and the Waltons. But her fake-it-til-we-make-it plan to advance medical technology a half-century by sheer willpower without actually knowing much about blood never had a chance of working. But the many Deep State superstars didn’t have somebody who could explain that to them.
Someone on Sailer’s blog leaves this comment.
First time I heard of the claims, I thought “what a pile of bullshit; there is no way it can be true – not without at least a hint of how it is done”. All the other components of the scam came into the focus later. All in all, the scam is pretty remarkable even though I still don’t understand how she managed to get all these people. There must be someone behind the scenes.
I’m all for shitting all over our privileged class, but this was a scam a decade in the making. I get that these people are dipshits. I get that Holmes was a sociopathic manipulator. I get that she served their idiotic Girl Power political narrative. But these were rich and powerful people, could they really be so stupid with hundreds of millions of their own money that they wouldn’t eventually get around to having some scientist evaluate what everybody now acknowledges were laughable claims of efficacy?
Commenter Jim Christian,
Mr. Sailer didn’t quite get to it, but what those bastards REALLY wanted was to put Theranos up for an IPO, fleece the investor public, raise a few tens of billions on say, NASDAQ and as soon as that was done pay themselves and burn cash while reverting Theranos to old tech or figure something else out for it, likely loot it and close it like Solyndra. The “innovative” blood testing was a dangerous sham, the FDA knew it and NASDAQ or whomever would have figured it out. They’re cut off at the pass and it’s about time one of these finally was. Nice try though. The notion that a crooked, empty storefront is “worth” 9 billion is a gag-bag of a joke. The principals at Theranos have turtled and now that the truth is out, everyone with dough in the kitty is looking madly for a way out.
ROK never contemplated any of that stuff.
Solyndra was another “revolutionary and disruptive” tech company that sold solar panels. Turns out their manufacturing method flat out could not compete with traditional solar panel manufacturing, and they went bellyup after an extremely successful IPO. Let’s take another look at that investment team.
Holmes assembled a board of directors featuring a Deep State hall-of-fame lineup, including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, current secretary of defense General “Mad Dog” Mattis, and former Senate majority leader Bill Frist. Her Democrats included retired Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sam Nunn, Carter administration defense secretary William Perry, and Al Gore’s superlawyer David Boies.
Investors in her Potemkin start-up included Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Mexican monopolist Carlos Slim, New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft, various Waltons, and Rupert Murdoch. The press baron lost his $125 million investment, but emerged with some dignity because he refused Holmes’ calls to spike Carreyrou’s 2015 exposé in his WSJ.
Boy, that sure is a high powered and dangerous room to be swindling out of hundreds of millions of dollars. And not with one flashy presentation, but with a decade plus scheme based completely on fraud.
We’ll never really know without FTN sifting through court documents for the truth, but I believe many of her investors were simply trying to pull an IPO scam, as that Sailer commentator claimed. It’s sort of similar to a pyramid scheme, where they get tons of the general public’s money, sell off their shares while paying themselves huge salaries, or transferring the money to themselves in some other way, and slink off before the game is up. They did the same with Solyndra after all.
I’ll write up another piece when the trial is actually finished.
“yenta” there I fixed it for you
“but I believe many of her investors were simply trying to pull an IPO scam”
My thoughts exactly. None of Holmes’ (((backers))) were hoodwinked in the slightest – they saw a golden opportunity for an old school pump-and-dump, and they thought they had the perfect angle to pitch it to the broader public (muh wahmens in tech). It’s a shame that she might actually get the pussy pass on some of her crimes – she has a lot of chutzpah to claim that a fucking Pajeet was the true criminal mastermind.
Also, regarding the suicide – was there anything suspicious about it? My inner schizo is telling me that that it’s about as legit as Epstein’s bunk bed backflip.
Joseph P Farrell did some good research on this, with some useful links as well:
https://gizadeathstar.com/2021/10/the-right-questions-about-theranos-finally-asked/
He agrees that it is utterly implausible that such people would be taken in by even the most devious and beautiful of people; they wouldn’t even get past the gatekeepers to make a pitch. He goes into much greater detail about this, and his theory of why is that it was about creating a technology that would be useful in population control. A ‘black box’ that could diagnose people on a blood prick, but which could be used to diagnose people with whatever you wanted if you controlled the tech.
I’m gonna take one look at this retarded puff face grinning blonde skank…then I’m gonna invest millions in her company because she knows science and stuff.
Her wikipedia entry has information showing she is distantly jewish. Everything in this country that isn’t right involves jews.