It looks like Elizabeth Holmes payed some PR company to get a lot of news articles her to whitewash her name just when we forgot about how cruel she was. On me it works just the opposite, she should just serve her sentence in her luxury prison and come out quiet.
found the article quite weak, hurt by the East Coast media’s tendency to make everything about government & Trump.
> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
Do they at least pay good interest on the money they took in? Because a decade long interest free loan is a really weird thing and non-refundable only makes sense if they end up shipping them, and they should probably ship them before a sizeable fraction of their customers has died. 9 years to make a car...
A number of the people who paid those downpayments, were invited to the recent Roadster demo. Where they got to see a similar car demonstrated, complete with flying. And with no sense of whether it will actually be built, or will be street legal.
No, I would have added an 'r'. But seriously: there are obvious grift kickstarters, though the platform operators do quite a bit of work to keep those out. But at some point the line between 'grifter' and 'highly motivated but delusional founder' gets blurry and I'm happy I don't have to make the call. More so because it's going to be a mess of false positives and false negatives with plenty of overlap, even for experts in the various fields. So making it a marketplace is a good idea, the problem with that is that it then becomes a competition in marketing and glitz rather than solid financial, technical and commercial planning.
Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds.
Pre-selected for gullability. If you have bridges to sell... I once came across a grifter that had the principal of a VC company here totally sewn up. He called him 'sensei' and did everything he could to butter him up. Meanwhile he was defrauding them to the tune of a couple of million every year. Very scary such people.
Agreed. Even the non-governmental example in the article - Nikola Corporation - was uncovered as a fraud more than six years ago. And the governmental examples as described aren't even fraud, they're corruption.
Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.
Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.
A good argument could be made that precisely because it happens in government and those people aren’t booted out post-haste, then society is apparently a lot more OK with this style of behavior than before.
I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?
And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.
Most of the population wouldn't care about another Theranos because it wouldn't have any impact on them. People only cared about the first Theranos because Elizabeth Holmes was such a bizarre character. The fraud and business failure didn't have any broader impact on the financial system. And while knowingly giving unsuspecting patients inaccurate blood test lab results was inexcusable and deserving of severe punishment, in the end no one died.
I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.
We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.
Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)
Yeah —- the fake it till you make it, ghost-in-the-machine strategy has these as extreme outcomes. AI companies whose devices are in fact human-level intelligent because they are being remote-managed by teleworkers, etc.
Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.
After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?
> So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
Interesting comparison to compare the "standard" software fraudulence of fudging your activity numbers to Theranos' fraud.
I think when it comes down to it, it's a false equivalence - one is a temporary measure done to overcome an inherently short-term critical mass limitation, the second is an indefinite fraud trying to paint an impossible company as real.
"Fake it till you make it" is a legitimate and almost necessary strategy for an early-stage startup, I wouldn't conflate it with Theranos' fraud.
Reddit still has a substantial amount of… not CSAM but rather skeezy porn. They just kind of hide it and ban it from the front page and auto feeds.
There’s a long history of revenge porn and other nonconsensual porn showing up there and being hard to remove.
The whole site had been declining badly too, and is loaded with bots. Still an okay place to get news in some areas but pretty meh and the comments are always echo chambers.
Fraud is rampant before major economic crashes. Same thing happened in the 1920s. Charles Ponzi, the Florida real estate schemes, Goldman Sachs leveraged investment trusts. There was even what might be the first tech bubble pump and dump with RCA (a radio company). A bunch of investors bought up shares and then went to work hyping it to the public so they would buy in. The investors then dumped it and left everyone else holding the bag. Sound familiar?
The real fraud is companies raising 100s of millions with fakeish ARR values and then couple of years later they collapse into nothingness
This is how the great depression started. Everybody learned you can make a lot of fast money with fraud. Until the whole house of cards collapsed.
It looks like Elizabeth Holmes payed some PR company to get a lot of news articles her to whitewash her name just when we forgot about how cruel she was. On me it works just the opposite, she should just serve her sentence in her luxury prison and come out quiet.
I see a lot of red flags if not outright fraud. But perhaps it’s always been this way? VC is for the taking if you’re convincing.
https://archive.ph/BdlXw
found the article quite weak, hurt by the East Coast media’s tendency to make everything about government & Trump.
> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
Does asking for downpayments on vehicles you will never ship count?
If so then you you have one more example now.
They took nonrefundable down payments on the Roadster nine years ago.
Do they at least pay good interest on the money they took in? Because a decade long interest free loan is a really weird thing and non-refundable only makes sense if they end up shipping them, and they should probably ship them before a sizeable fraction of their customers has died. 9 years to make a car...
A number of the people who paid those downpayments, were invited to the recent Roadster demo. Where they got to see a similar car demonstrated, complete with flying. And with no sense of whether it will actually be built, or will be street legal.
Preorder down payments are a thing I won’t do anymore.
Never done it on something that huge but I’ve been burned on one or two kickstarter type things.
If you can’t pay and then take delivery it doesn’t exist.
I see kickstarter projects as gifts until proven otherwise.
Did you mean grifts?
No, I would have added an 'r'. But seriously: there are obvious grift kickstarters, though the platform operators do quite a bit of work to keep those out. But at some point the line between 'grifter' and 'highly motivated but delusional founder' gets blurry and I'm happy I don't have to make the call. More so because it's going to be a mess of false positives and false negatives with plenty of overlap, even for experts in the various fields. So making it a marketplace is a good idea, the problem with that is that it then becomes a competition in marketing and glitz rather than solid financial, technical and commercial planning.
Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds.
I'd love to get my hands on that customer list.
Pre-selected for gullability. If you have bridges to sell... I once came across a grifter that had the principal of a VC company here totally sewn up. He called him 'sensei' and did everything he could to butter him up. Meanwhile he was defrauding them to the tune of a couple of million every year. Very scary such people.
Agreed. Even the non-governmental example in the article - Nikola Corporation - was uncovered as a fraud more than six years ago. And the governmental examples as described aren't even fraud, they're corruption.
Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.
Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.
It’s a movie review so they didn’t actually go in deep on the fraud.
FTX, Terra-Luna, Nikola (as mentioned), Builder.ai, Frank, Kalder, Joonko
O and have you heard about the AI labs and how they calculate ARR? lol.
Statistically significant though? I do not know.
A good argument could be made that precisely because it happens in government and those people aren’t booted out post-haste, then society is apparently a lot more OK with this style of behavior than before.
I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?
And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.
Most of the population wouldn't care about another Theranos because it wouldn't have any impact on them. People only cared about the first Theranos because Elizabeth Holmes was such a bizarre character. The fraud and business failure didn't have any broader impact on the financial system. And while knowingly giving unsuspecting patients inaccurate blood test lab results was inexcusable and deserving of severe punishment, in the end no one died.
I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.
This is the point though. Trump's approval ratings prove his base does not give a single flying fuck about his grift and corruption. They admire it.
Now you've got a third of the country who are just totally ok with fraud if its perpetrated by someone on their team.
Nearly all tech billionaires are on their team.
I don’t believe it has become the norm.
We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.
Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)
Yeah —- the fake it till you make it, ghost-in-the-machine strategy has these as extreme outcomes. AI companies whose devices are in fact human-level intelligent because they are being remote-managed by teleworkers, etc.
Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.
After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?
This "succeed at all costs" culture isn't a Valley thing, it's an American thing. Look at our President.
> So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
Interesting comparison to compare the "standard" software fraudulence of fudging your activity numbers to Theranos' fraud.
I think when it comes down to it, it's a false equivalence - one is a temporary measure done to overcome an inherently short-term critical mass limitation, the second is an indefinite fraud trying to paint an impossible company as real.
"Fake it till you make it" is a legitimate and almost necessary strategy for an early-stage startup, I wouldn't conflate it with Theranos' fraud.
Theranos faked it, the difference is that they never had any intention of making it.
I think that's what you're saying, at least.
> Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
That's not the biggest problem by far. They started out catering to literal pedos, look into the r/jailbait controversy.
Reddit still has a substantial amount of… not CSAM but rather skeezy porn. They just kind of hide it and ban it from the front page and auto feeds.
There’s a long history of revenge porn and other nonconsensual porn showing up there and being hard to remove.
The whole site had been declining badly too, and is loaded with bots. Still an okay place to get news in some areas but pretty meh and the comments are always echo chambers.
Fraud is rampant before major economic crashes. Same thing happened in the 1920s. Charles Ponzi, the Florida real estate schemes, Goldman Sachs leveraged investment trusts. There was even what might be the first tech bubble pump and dump with RCA (a radio company). A bunch of investors bought up shares and then went to work hyping it to the public so they would buy in. The investors then dumped it and left everyone else holding the bag. Sound familiar?
Cannot read due to paywall
https://archive.ph/BdlXw
It works fine without JS.