logoalt Hacker News

Zigurdtoday at 5:06 PM2 repliesview on HN

In the current environment I doubt Elizabeth Holmes would go to prison. She would be saying the machine would work by early next year. After all a drop of blood is just a smaller quantity. Making the machine work is just an engineering problem.

If she were really clever she would recruit a social media army of all the weird conspiracy theorists who think "medbeds" are real.

Of course now we know that a drop of capillary blood containing interstitial fluid and a random mix of venous and arterial blood is unsuitable for most blood tests. At least you will have googled that if you're an Elon stan preparing to tell me how they're not comparable.


Replies

ryandraketoday at 6:11 PM

Cool thought process, but the real reason Elizabeth Holmes would not go to prison if she pulled that shit today is much, much simpler: She would know to make a nice sized donation to the current administration (or a sweet business deal for one of his family members), and the justice system would simply be completely hands-off her. She'd give 5% equity to Jared Kushner or something, and go on committing fraud with confidence. It's not complex anymore. Pay to play.

umpalumpaaatoday at 5:14 PM

The big difference was that she was in the medical field. She used her machines that worked unreliability on patients and caused actual damage to humans. Then she noticed that this could be a problem and switched to blood analyzer from Siemens. But she still continued to say that the machines do work. She lied to investors. I still feel her case is a lot different to what musk is doing. I think you can definitely say “coming next year” and actually needing 5 years. You cannot blatantly lie and harm people along the way

show 4 replies