The amazing story of Elizabeth Holmes, a female, self-made multi-billionaire at age 32 who built it all on a big medical testing scam

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Elizabeth Holmes saw herself as the Steve Jobs of the medical testing world. She was a college dropout who started a revolutionary blood testing company which seemed poised to simplify the arduous blood testing procedure forever.

She even dressed like Jobs.

Secretive, somewhat attractive, and self-confident, Holmes built her company Theranos from scratch, and it rose to be worth $9 billion at its peak. Holmes herself was worth $4 billion at that point, despite being born in 1984. No female had ever made a billion dollars on her own at a younger age.

Theranos used revolutionary technology which would allow complex blood tests to be done by a simple device, using just a single pin prick.

There was only one problem: It was all a scam. Or at least a lie.

Theranos' technology never worked, and they falsified test results in order to cover up this little inconvenient fact.

Now it's all falling apart.

Article: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/...anos-exclusive

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When she first came up with the precursor to the idea of Theranos, which eventually aimed to reap vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger, she approached several of her professors at Stanford, according to someone who knew Holmes back then. But most explained to the chemical-engineering major that it was virtually impossible to do so with any real efficacy. “I told her, I don’t think your idea is going to work,” Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, said to me, about Holmes’s seminal pitch for Theranos. As Gardner explained, it is impossible to get a precise result from the tip of a finger for most of the tests that Theranos would claim to conduct accurately. When a finger is pricked, the probe breaks up cells, allowing debris, among other things, to escape into the interstitial fluid. While it is feasible to test for pathogens this way, a pinprick is too unreliable for obtaining more nuanced readings. Furthermore, there isn’t that much reliable data that you can reap from such a small amount of blood. But Holmes was nothing if not determined. Rather than drop her idea, she tried to persuade Channing Robertson, her adviser at Stanford, to back her in her quest. He did. (“It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”)

Holmes subsequently raised $6 million in funding, the first of almost $700 million that would follow. Money often comes with strings attached in Silicon Valley, but even by its byzantine terms, Holmes’s were unusual. She took the money on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked, and that she had final say and control over every aspect of her company. This surreptitiousness scared off some investors. When Google Ventures, which focuses more than 40 percent of its investments on medical technology, tried to perform due diligence on Theranos to weigh an investment, Theranos never responded. Eventually, Google Ventures sent a venture capitalist to a Theranos Walgreens Wellness Center to take the revolutionary pinprick blood test. As the V.C. sat in a chair and had several large vials of blood drawn from his arm, far more than a pinprick, it became apparent that something was amiss with Theranos’s promise.

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Amazing.

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Originally Posted by Dan Druff

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Elizabeth Holmes saw herself as the Steve Jobs of the medical testing world. She was a college dropout who started a revolutionary blood testing company which seemed poised to simplify the arduous blood testing procedure forever.

She even dressed like Jobs.

Pretty, secretive, and self-confident, Holmes built her company Theranos from scratch, and it rose to be worth $9 billion at its peak. Holmes herself was worth $4 billion at that point, despite being born in 1984. No female had ever made a billion dollars on her own at a younger age.

Theranos used revolutionary technology which would allow complex blood tests to be done by a device at home, using just a single pin prick.

There was only one problem: It was all a scam. Or at least a lie.

Theranos' technology never worked, and they falsified test results in order to cover up this little inconvenient fact.

Now it's all falling apart.

Article: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/...anos-exclusive

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She even dressed like Jobs.

GOT HER!

She managed to amass a very impressive list of board of directors that literally had no knowledge of medicine or health care. Ex. Kissinger

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Originally Posted by Krypt

She managed to amass a very impressive list of board of directors that literally had no knowledge of medicine or health care. Ex. Kissinger

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As Holmes started to assemble her board of directors, she chose a dozen older white men, almost none of whom had a background in anything related to health care. This included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state George Shultz, former Georgia senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, and William J. Perry, the former defense secretary. (Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader, and former cardiovascular doctor, was an exception.) “This was a board that was better suited to decide if America should invade Iraq than vet a blood-testing company,” one person said to me.

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The author of this article (Nick Bilton) is a white man himself, but clearly is self-hating, as he pointlessly labels people as "white men" several times in the article. I'm serious. He provides no context as to why race or gender is important when stating someone is a "white man", yet liberally sprinkles that descriptor throughout the piece.

But putting that aside, this is a LOL-worthy board of directors for a medical tech company.

I sometimes forget Kissinger is still alive, because he was already over 50 when he served under Nixon.

The dude is 93 years old now. Aside from having zero expertise in medical technology, it's hard to believe that Kissinger would be useful on any board of directors at this point, even if you go back some years to when he was appointed. I guess it was all about buying influence and appearance of legitimacy.

I love this whole story.

It highlights the absurdity of the yes-man culture in Silicon Valley, and the amazing fact that a person who talks a good game could hoodwink a large group of intelligent people to the tune of a $9 billion company valuation.

Like, how is it even possible that this went on for so long without it instantly going public that this device didn't work, and probably never would work?

Everyone accepted Holmes' corporate culture of secrecy because Jobs did it that way, and it all worked out for Apple. Therefore, being ridiculously secretive is never a red flag, right? Just keep dumping that VC and private equity money in that bin around the corner, and don't ask us any questions.

To the credit of most major VC operations, almost all of them passed on Theranos, given its secrecy. A few went for it, but the remainder of the funding came from private equity.

In order to be the next Steve Jobs, you must develop terminal cancer and treat it only with herbs and vegetarian food.

Interesting idea, these blood testing companies such as Quest Diagnostics take way too much blood, far more than they need to.

In order to properly test blood you need only 7 to 12 drops.

She was very successful in getting old white men to invest millions in her business.

Theranos has patents on a lot of different testing devices, plus they still have hundreds of millions of dollars of investors money.

She employed over 1,000 people and now just about every way her company could make money has been cut off.

Just don't look into her eyes or she will hypnotize you.


http://www.achievement.org/achievers...e/hol0-011.jpg

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Fucking Quest Diagnostics. They really took over.

About 8 years ago, one of the Vegas branches couldn't bill my insurance correctly no matter how many times they tried. They kept sending me incorrect bills claiming I owed $95, when I didn't owe anywhere near that. I probably owed like $20 or something. I kept calling them back telling them that they fucked up, and they would resubmit it and just fuck it up again.

After about 6 months and several tries, I stopped hearing from them, but my insurance still hadn't processed a correct claim. I called Quest and asked WTF was going on, and they told me they just zeroed out my account because they couldn't figure out how to bill it.

:lol

Holmes has also abandoned Twitter.

https://twitter.com/eholmes2003/with_replies?lang=en

Her last tweet was from December 2015. On that same day, she also praised Serena Williams for "breaking that glass ceiling". Uh huh.

Oh... and she retweeted this five days earlier:

Embedded Tweet

So, let me get this straight, she scammed by saying her company had developed an all-in-one blood test that could be done with the prick of a finger?? LOL. could people buy these kits for use at home??

More to the point, what repercussions will this perfect example of modern capitalism face...? Thought not.

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As Holmes started to assemble her board of directors, she chose a dozen older white men, almost none of whom had a background in anything related to health care. This included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state George Shultz, former Georgia senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, and William J. Perry, the former defense secretary. (Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader, and former cardiovascular doctor, was an exception.) “This was a board that was better suited to decide if America should invade Iraq than vet a blood-testing company,” one person said to me.

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LOL

This has to be a perfect example of it's not who you know but who you blow.

This was a scam, but damn i am very impressed by her. She must give terrific blow jobs.

I recall when this company emerged. I couldn't figure it out. There was already a host of companies that allowed you to order your own bloodwork for fairly cheap. There were in 1997. Some doctor for the company I'm sure was signing off on all of the requests, but I did it anonymously for years. Buy x test, they email you a number, show up at quest with simply an order and number, get emailed results.

I foresaw the collection of digital medical records. I always felt checkig your bloodwork to see if your cholesterol was high, if liver values were elevated from drinking like a fish, and rectifying lifestyle on your own would save you a ton of money moving forward. If you couldn't rectify it, then take it to your doctor. I always viewed a health insurance mandate as inevitable. If it had to be done via free market, I thought doing your own bloodwork akin to paying out of your pocket for a fender bender. When shopping for low rates, you'd rather have little negative history. Having a mother in insurance and seeing how they profile prospective clients I'm sure colored my view. Whether health or auto, they're absurdly risk averse, and that risk aversion is what eventually led to the ACA.

If a test was expensive, and something you didn't want to go out of pocket for, this company never addressed that problem anyway.

Of course, then I got cancer, and none of what I had done mattered. My health history was forever fucked, so it was somewhat a waste of money. Pre-Bush, you could order all kinds of great shit online, so it wasn't totally wasted money as I always ordered all pain medications and such online. That those weren't in my medical record has proven to be valuable when encountering pain. You don't look like a drug seeker.

I thought a bartender/waitress gave me herpes in the last year. Was almost sure of it. I did all my tests via online company and quest because it wasn't something I wanted to address with family doctor when I could just order the medication, if positive, online. After ruling every STD under the sun out, then I went to dermatologist and the girl gave me impetigo, on my cock lol, and it was gone after getting some ointment. I generally hate the way doctors offices are ran now, with some 20 year-old 10 week Medical Assistant certificate asking you everything in the world and entering it on laptop, only for doctor to come in at end and finish appointment. I'm not about to discuss my penchant and attraction to hot mess mentally unstable women to some kid fresh out of high school. It wasn't the first time I had to sweat bloodwork.


As exactly the type of customer they were seeking, I knew this company was a fail. It basically only catered to someone with a needle phobia. A lot of venture capital people really failed to do their homework on this one.

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Originally Posted by Starbucks Spunk Bucket

So, let me get this straight, she scammed by saying her company had developed an all-in-one blood test that could be done with the prick of a finger?? LOL. could people buy these kits for use at home??

More to the point, what repercussions will this perfect example of modern capitalism face...? Thought not.

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How true. The government should ignore pressure to bomb Nigerian villages/scammervilles, and turn the effort towards sorority houses

Good looking woman but really creepy voice. When I run into somebody like this I try to figure out if its a chick or a dude.

Is that turtle neck hiding an Adam's apple?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfaJZAdfNE

Does she get to keep the 4 billion?

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Originally Posted by Mintjewlips

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As Holmes started to assemble her board of directors, she chose a dozen older white men, almost none of whom had a background in anything related to health care. This included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state George Shultz, former Georgia senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, and William J. Perry, the former defense secretary. (Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader, and former cardiovascular doctor, was an exception.) “This was a board that was better suited to decide if America should invade Iraq than vet a blood-testing company,” one person said to me.

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LOL

This has to be a perfect example of it's not who you know but who you blow.

This was a scam, but damn i am very impressed by her. She must give terrific blow jobs.

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Apparently she's had a lot of pricks.

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Originally Posted by hongkonger

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Originally Posted by Mintjewlips

LOL

This has to be a perfect example of it's not who you know but who you blow.

This was a scam, but damn i am very impressed by her. She must give terrific blow jobs.

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Apparently she's had a lot of pricks.

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One thing's for sure: She fucked (over) her investors.

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Originally Posted by herbertstemple

Good looking woman but really creepy voice. When I run into somebody like this I try to figure out if its a chick or a dude.

Is that turtle neck hiding an Adam's apple?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfaJZAdfNE

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I can't believe anyone takes Jim Cramer seriously anymore after he pumped Lenny Dykstra as a stock expert.

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Originally Posted by hongkonger

Apparently she's had a lot of pricks.

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more pricks than a Chelsea dart board?

I don't know why she even got the traction she did.. We were using this system in the ER back in 2004/2005 https://www.abbottpointofcare.com/home

We could do rapid BMPs in the ER even check cardiac enzyme numbers within 10mins. If Abbott had the demand their system could pretty much run any test requiring chemical analysis..

Truth is it uses a very minute amount of blood same as the at home cholesterol systems as well as the test kits they sell to do A1C testing for Diabetics (checks avg of BS over 3 mon period). Her idea was way late to market honestly.. it is true as others have said you don't need a significant amount to test. Hell even glucometers which used to take 3-4 drops of blood now use very small drops (1 microliter) and are close in accuracy as the expensive hospital models are..

Holy crap her voice sounds like something out of Westworld. Waiting for her faceplate to fall off and reveal the robo-bitch behind it.