It wasn't worth a shot. It was a scam from day zero.
Even the best case scenario of the tech was a lie. There is no way that at any price that anything remotely like the original vision would be possible. Simply put, the optics and physics never could have worked, and anyone with any knowhow in the space knew so and said so loudly.
This is not a legit attempt that failed. It's a scam that's still going on.
I worked for a small precision optics company that made components for their development efforts. We made machines for fabricating unconventional optics for both MIC and commercial/consumer-oriented manufacturers. We thought it had a low likelihood of meeting the performance specifications at a reasonable cost.
Not much different than a 20th century Broward "opportunity".
Hundred years ago in Broward there were still some blatant frauds where the investors had put in money to purchase land but the "developer" just spent the money without purchasing any promising assets. But mostly by that time it was typically already more sophisticated and actual land would be purchased which would be impossible to develop without further investment, and even then might never turn out to be profitable. Before spending the rest of the
money, trying to raise more money of course.
Hey but it was other peoples' money so it was worth it for the "visionary" to take his chances and go "all in". With the remote chance that any money might eventually be made, that would be great when starting from nothing. Without actual profits or even income, if the anticipated scale can grow into a few million for the one selling the dream, that's still OK even if the investors have put in dozens of millions.
Things have come a long way since then, in the last half-century especially.
When there are not so many legitimate sources of income for many decades with no end in sight, the culture tends to embrace the illegitimate.
In ways that are technically legal as determined by extreme experience exploring the edge cases.
The surprising thing about Theranos is that it wasn't in Ft. Lauderdale.
What are you basing your opinion on? I’m basing it on things that I personally witnessed, not general hype. From what I can tell is that they failed to make their prototype (which garnered investment from VCs) into a real product that is miniaturized and manufacturable at reasonable cost.
Scam do happen but here it is not the case. WSJ would pounce on that.
Comparing Magic Leap with Theranos is disingenuous in two ways: 1) Severely underplaying the severity of Theranos' crimes. 2) Overblowing Magic Leap’s execution failure as fraud.
Even the best case scenario of the tech was a lie. There is no way that at any price that anything remotely like the original vision would be possible. Simply put, the optics and physics never could have worked, and anyone with any knowhow in the space knew so and said so loudly.
This is not a legit attempt that failed. It's a scam that's still going on.