
Theranos Inc.’s Partners in Blood - jedwhite
https://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-inc-s-partners-in-blood-1526662047
======
bane
Not too much new here except:

\- focus is on Balwani, the COO who drove to work in cars with vanity plates
on his sports cars that read DAZKPTL and VDIVICI

\- Balwani and Holmes met in Beijing as part of a Stanford course in China,
she was young and bullied by the other students and Balwani took her under his
wing

\- apparently Holmes and Balwani were dating, she fired him, they aren't
together and because of the ongoing criminal probe have been instructed not to
speak with each other

\- Balwani had a small war against Glassdoor reviews including having HR post
fake ones and pressuring Glassdoor into taking down overly negative ones

\- Holmes' weirdly low voice was an act! She's been caught using her normal
register.

\- They invited VP Biden to tour a fake lab.

Man the onion layers of weirdness just never stop peeling away about this
company.

~~~
akyu
I called out the fake voice thing years ago. It was blatantly obvious, but I
guess people were afraid of being "sexist".

~~~
mc32
Also curiously sanpaku, not that that really means anything. JFK was sanpaku
as well, so... meh.

------
smaili
> In 1999, he joined CommerceBid.com as its president and No. 2 executive; it
> was developing a software program for companies to pit their suppliers
> against one another for contracts in live online auctions. Business-to-
> business e-commerce had become hot, and in November 1999, the sector
> leader—the similarly named Commerce One—acquired the startup for $232
> million in cash and stock, though it had just three clients testing its
> software.

Ah yes, the dot-com bubble at its finest.

~~~
jacquesm
Don't complain too much it is what produced the starting capital that made YC
possible.

~~~
atomical
I thought you quit HN?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes I did. In 2011!

------
txsh
Why aren’t we allowed to criticize these lunatics before their companies fall
apart?

It was obvious to many commenters on HN that these people were crooks long
before the media caught up. But comments critical of them were often flagged
or deleted. Musk’s house of cards receives the same preferential treatment.

How many lives does a wacky billionaire get to destroy before HN stops running
interference?

How much blood does a god need to bleed before we stop worshipping them?

~~~
citrablue
The answer, of course, is hindsight bias. It says more about our inability to
understand the probabilistic nature of the future than any sort of commentary
about the downfall of civilized society.

Call to mind the Michael Dell letter about Apple.

Think in terms of your confidence about the current environment, right now.
Would you bet something invaluable -- your children's lives, let's say -- that
e.g. Uber will not be worth $10b on public markets in 5 years?

If not, we have to ack there's uncertainty in the moment. It's only after the
fact that the probability density function collapses to 1, and we forget about
the other options.

~~~
aaron-lebo
It's maybe hindsight that allows us to know whether the schemes of a huckster
are going to fail, but it's not hard to see people who are hucksters. They
make big promises and don't meet them, and when that happens they just make
another promise (usually including excuses or distractions from why they were
previously wrong), and people worship them for that. These people are either
liars or just wrong most of the time, but people don't seem to care. It's not
that it isn't obvious, it's that people don't want to admit what's right
there.

Maybe it is from growing up in an environment where I've seen people who love
power and control (even if that's only over a very small amount of people), it
desn't shock me that ramps up with increasing power and fame.

There are a lot of people on the scene today which are obvious hucksters, but
nobody is going to admit that (and some won't) until their lies actually ruin
things. Again, see Draper whom even knowing what he does is willing to lie or
be delusional about what happened there.

Consider that there's lots and lots of people who are willing to actually give
up their lives for weird cult leaders. If that's the case (and those lies are
very obvious to all but a small few), there's so much room on the other side
of that where you can be equally as manipulative and fraudulent but because
it's only business or politics and not religion, people aren't willing to
apply the same standard and say, yeah, that guy is a liar who likes people
talking about him (or whatever gender).

Usually people in positions of power have actively sought that power, and it
attracts a very specific kind of personality.

~~~
mrep
Are you saying Musk is a huckster who makes big promises and don't meet them
because he has hit most of his promises from what I have seen (albeit they are
always delayed but that is just his management strategy to incentivize his
employees to work harder)?

~~~
aaron-lebo
Didn't mean to target Musk, but he certainly is in the same area. You ever
notice how thin-skinned he is towards criticism and how he's constantly
pivoting to projects which are years away? Besides the actual
lies/exaggerations about Autopilot (people have died because of this), forgive
this first title. The important part is the quote:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/musk-epic-
failure-2016-5?op=1](http://www.businessinsider.com/musk-epic-
failure-2016-5?op=1)

 _Tesla reported first-quarter earnings last week, and while they were better
than Wall Street expected, the earthshaking news that emerged was that Musk is
taking the carmaker in a new strategic direction.

Tesla, which delivered about 50,000 vehicles last year, is aiming to deliver
500,000 in 2018. The production target isn't new, but the timeline is. Tesla
had previously said it would build half a million cars a year by 2020._

This did not happen, which led him to Tweet last July that they could deliver
20k cars per month by Dec. This did not happen either. Investors were relieved
they managed to hit 2k per week as of March (this is down from the 2.5k they
were targeting).

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832)

It's really not a difficult tactic. If you have lots of money you can
subsidize lots of failure. The failure ends up ignored, but your 10% hit ratio
is looked at as though you're some kind of visionary. You can do that for a
long time, if you've got the runway. Holmes will probably be running a very
big company in about a decade.

~~~
mrep
>You ever notice how thin-skinned he is towards criticism

Don't really notice this. Got any examples (I follow tesla and spacex a lot so
I'm probably biased towards backing him)?

>How he's constantly pivoting to projects which are years away?

Really> His Tesla master plan has been on point. The only spacex big change I
can remember is the huge delays to falcon heavy but that was primarily due to
falcon 9 capabilities growing by leaps and bounds cannibalizing almost all of
the heavy contracts (also, changing falcon 9 capabilities effects falcon heavy
design).

~~~
greglindahl
If you go check out /r/enoughmuskspam, you can discover that SpaceX is a
failure because they don't have full reusability of Falcon 9 yet, or because
they canceled Red Dragon and Grey Dragon, or that BFR is a distraction from
the 'fact' that SpaceX is selling commercial launches at a big loss, etc.

And then you compare the user list to /r/ula and /r/nasa and various Tesla
shorts groups, and you'll find a similar list of usernames. Hmm.

------
atomical
Tim Draper said a lot of nice things about Holmes. What's up with that? He's
making himself look like an idiot.

~~~
sparky_z
Somebody in another thread theorized that he's signaling to future business
partners. "Do business with me and I will always publicly have your back, no
matter what."

Seems plausible to me.

~~~
rdlecler1
It would also signal to downstream investors: I don’t do my due diligence so
don’t trust the companies I invest in. VC is a reputation market on both sides
of the table so companies will want to take this into consideration.

------
neonate
[http://archive.li/IXtF9](http://archive.li/IXtF9)

------
dogruck
Anybody have a guess why Elizabeth Holmes got such a small punishment for
running such a massive scam?

~~~
dogruck
Why is this question downvoted? People disagree with my view that the
punishment is small in relation to the size of the scam?

~~~
citrablue
Can you point to the specific statutes that she violated? "Fraud" is very
broad -- I am not clear that she did anything illegally, just unethically and
deceptive. We aren't criminalizing how Reddit astroturfed their site. Is the
only difference the scope? The investment monies? The potential?

I'm not interested in debating the moral aspects, as I suspect we violently
agree. But it's crucial to be specific, against current legal code, when
stating things like you did.

~~~
stochastic_monk
Serious question: is a test provider who knowingly provides test results which
it knows to be inaccurate and therefore leads patients to wrong diagnoses and
potentially treatment, are they criminally liable or only civilly for
fraud/breach of contract?

------
jedwhite
For anyone needing to bypass the paywall, if you google "WSJ Theranos Inc.’s
Partners in Blood" in an Incognito window you will generally have no problem
getting access. Not guaranteed but works most of the time. Sometimes there
will be a pop up to close. Using Incognito increases the likelihood of access
if you have previous WSJ use.

~~~
bronson
That hasn't worked for going on a year now. The only way that I know of is to
bounce through a social network link.

~~~
jedwhite
It worked for me without problem in this case. If you regularly access the WSJ
using this method they may track IPs as well as cookies as they have a
differentiated access pattern for social and search links based on
identifiable user history. Incognito mode gets around cookie tracking but not
IP tracking.

------
steve19
Pay wall bypass:

[https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/theranos-inc-s-partners-
in-...](https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/theranos-inc-s-partners-in-
blood-1526662047)

Edit: Because it freaked someone out, clicking on this link redirects you via.
Facebook. You don't need to be logged into Facebook for it to work.

~~~
adeptus
WARNING: clicking this link may try to redirect you through facebook and
expose your identity. Also, it didn't work for me as far as bypassing wsj.com
to get the full article. I was logged off of facebook, but due to cookies,
facebook still knew whom I last logged in as.

If this worked for anyone, please just copy/paste the article text in here...
assuming that's allowed.

~~~
JackCh
Archive.is has the full text, which is not atypical.

------
swampthinker
Wow, I kind of feel bad for Holmes now. Seems like she really got taken
advantage of and got romantic love interests confused with how to properly run
a company.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
How did she get taken advantage of? She commited a billion dollar fraud. All
of a sudden just because there's a guy in the picture it's all his playing and
she was just a pawn? Don't you think that's extremely patronising?

~~~
swampthinker
I'm speaking as someone who went through an emotionally abusive relationship.
I think you're significantly downplaying just how impactful shitty role models
and power dynamics like this can be.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
> I think you're significantly downplaying just how impactful shitty role
> models

What you said would make sense if we knew that she had him as role model. THEN
you could make the case that role models are important and claim that I
downplay their importance. But we don't know if she had him as role model, so
again you're guessing. I could just as easily make opposite guess: do you know
how easy it is to manipulate men by dangling sex in front of them?

