this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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So, people actually believed that an 18 or 19-year-old developed this revolutionary tech likely requiring several fields worth of knowledge to bring to fruition? I'm not familiar with the story beyond this article, but it sounds like those investors made a bad call. Not that that makes her less guilty of fraud, but if she didn't scam them someone else would have.
Investors have money, not brain. I remember an experiment where their compared a fund run by people and another one run by investing totally randomly. The second one won. Investment has never about being good at it, it was always luck that ran the game. We just hear a lot more about those who won big rather the those who ruined themselves.
There are exceptions to this, like Yale, Renaissance, Berkshire, and maybe Citadel. But most, even well-known funds, are run by incompetent people demanding extremely high fees, rendering any advantage they have over index funds essentially null (often even underperforming the market).
They were a mix of tech investors who thought they were so smart they knew everything, and clueless conservatives. People actually in the health industry didn't touch her with a 10 foot pole. I don't have any sympathy for the idiot investors, but she also defrauded patients with her tech.
Scamming rich people is a victimless crime.
In general, yes. But someone committed suicide because of her. They helped her found the company and were a long time employee until they were called as a witness in a court case and as a result got sidetracked in the company while the court case dragged on. At least that is my understanding.
His name was Ian Gibbons.
The only good thing to come out of this is that she scammed Henry Kissinger because, contrary to popular belief, he's a dumb idiot who got scammed by a kid.
You don't understand investing if this is your view.
Investors like these make 100s of these investments, and expect at least 50%-75% of them to fail. If theranos was successful they'd make 100x their money back, and that's the whole point. You only need 1 or 2 of those out of 100 and you're making absolute bank.
Otherwise you think some kid walking in saying they're going to disrupt taxis and take over the ride share industry worldwide would be successful? That some kid who dropped out of Harvard has made some magic social platform that everyone will be using? All of these ideas sound stupid/unrealistic and like bad investments, but if they work they make billionaires.