Funny you should mention her. I just saw a documentary about her on HBO. It was friggin hilarious. I never knew this lady was famous until now. So I typed her name in the forum to see if anyone discussed her, it seems one person has. lolContrarian Expatriate wrote: ↑October 9th, 2016, 7:09 amThe "billionaire" Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos is now being racked thru the coals in the press. Just last year, she was held up as the 32 y/o wonderkund who was making waves in STEM leadership. Now she is likely to be indicted and her net worth will be $0 after her investers are paid.
Women can be leaders, but it does not help when the media promotes incompetent women as noteworthy.
I can't believe a blonde good looking girl could get away with this. Just because she looks good and sounds intelligent and charming, everyone believed her, including older powerful white men, even though her claims made no sense and defied basic logic and she had no qualifications in medicine or biochemistry to try to create this Theranos invention of hers. People should have been skeptical from the get go, especially since she didn't know what she was talking about and was a college drop out and knew nothing about blood testing. What gall.
Yet at 19 she becomes the first billionaire? So anyone who looks good and is a smooth talker and has a charming charismatic personality can talk themselves into getting billions in investment funding? lol. I guess if she was in a different industry like computers or religion, she could have gotten away with that, but the healthcare industry isn't something you can get away with making false promises in, since people's health is at stake. That was her major critical error.
Here's the new 2 hour HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos if anyone wants to see it. It has Spanish subtitles but the audio is in English. It's very interesting to see how some good looking blonde woman could fool so many investors into forking over millions and billions.
Right now, Wikipedia says she's worth 0 dollars, which is less than me. lol. In fact, her worth is in the negative figures, since investors and the US government are suing her for 700 million, and she is using her remaining cash to pay lawyers to defend herself, rather than returning it to investors. lol. Hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
9 billion to 0? Wow I can't imagine a bigger fall than that. lol.Net worth US $0[1] (December 2019)
By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America, on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of her company.[5] In the following year, following revelations of potential fraud about its claims, Forbes had revised its published estimate of her net worth to zero,[6] and Fortune had named Holmes one of the "World's Most Disappointing Leaders".[7]
@Contrarian Expatriate what do you think? What went wrong? How did she dupe so many people? Didn't she know she had it coming?
Experts such as the Wallstreet Journal guy who wrote a book about her, said she was sincere and didn't intend to be a fraud. She was merely following the traditional American way of "fake it til you make it" which successful entrepreneurs, including Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, had done successfully in the past. However, those men ended up inventing things that worked and that were real, whereas she never really had a working product and the Theranos machine never did what it was supposed to do, not even close. She was hoping probably, that at some point, her Theranos device would become a reality, like the iphone became a reality eventually, but computers and blood work lab testing are totally different. You can make a computer do whatever you want it to, but you can't do that with blood work.
She probably fell for that New Age lie that "anyone can accomplish anything if they believe in themselves" and ignored the fact that in real life, some things are achievable and realistic, and some things are not. That's one of the downsides of New Age beliefs that "nothing is impossible". If you take that literally it can have disastrous consequences, such as in this case. I wish New Age gurus such as Dr. Wayne Dyer were still around to see the disastrous consequences of their teachings that "nothing is impossible" and that "anyone can accomplish anything if they believe it" etc. lol. Oh well. At least Dr. Deepak Chopra is still around to see that such New Age claims are not true and can have bad consequences, so they are not harmless.
Some of the experts that Holmes and her partner hired even told her that her invention was impossible and that the laws of physics could not be bent to serve her wishes. But she fired them. She only wanted to hear that "Yes it can be done" from Yes Men, even if saying so was a lie. lol. I guess that's how deluded Americans can be. They prefer a positive lie over a negative truth. The New Agers do too.
Btw do you guys think there may have been a conspiracy against Holmes? I mean if her Theranos machine had actually worked, then wouldn't the US healthcare industry lose billions of dollars? Someone would have lost a lot, especially the corporations in the US healthcare industry right? So could it be that they conspired to make sure that she would fail and that Theranos would never become a reality? Or was the whole thing doomed from the start? What do you guys think?
