Why Elizabeth Holmes Was Convicted (and Also Acquitted)

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It’s wild that the person known for being adept at manipulation absolutely did the exact same thing to the jurors and it totally worked.

Elizabeth Holmes is punished for making fools of rich investors but is acquitted for causing real harm to patients.

Juror #6: "She seemed so nice, so I couldn't convict." Juror #6, that's what a con artist does. That's why "con" is short for CONFIDENCE.

The takeaway: you can get away with fraud if you're a good enough con-man to convince a jury that you really believed you weren't doing anything wrong. Seems like a pretty big loophole to me.

"She genuinely believed she was helping people." No she didn't. She might genuinely believe she COULD EVENTUALLY help people, but if you knowingly lie about WHETHER OR NOT YOU USED YOUR OWN TESTS you probably don't genuinely believe your tests CURRENTLY help anyone.

As someone who works in a lab, this whole case annoys me to no end. They asked doctors and investors, not pathologists and laboratory staff. Her claims of being able to perform a large battery of tests on a few drops of blood are a pipedream. She annoys the ever loving hell out of me.

Someone can still be “likeable” and guilty … She really made a fool of the jurors involved …

My 12 year old daughter actually believes she is helping people when she play doctor. She BELIEVES that her actions are improving the lives of her parents but that doesn't mean I follow her advice and start taking medication for her made up diseases. This is the difference between miss Holmes and her beliefs, she endangered many lives and should be behind bars and banned from playing doctor ever again.

I'm a former neuroscience lab tech, and I can confirm that EVERYONE in lab science knew this was nonsense from the beginning. But of course no one listened to the actual technicians until far too late during this saga. 🙄

Her getting off on defrauding the patients was absolute malarkey. They sold physicians on a product that, even if she genuinely believed would work eventually, she knew it did not work yet. And knew that the end user would be the patients.

Fun fact, that's Holmes's stage voice. She intentionally tried to sound more masculine so her investors would trust her more.

fun fact: my mom used to work for her dad in the government. he talked about his “successful” daughter A LOT and pushed the sort of hubris that got her into trouble. yikes!

Here is the truly crazy thing about the Theranos scandal. Holmes was from Stanford, and the Theranos headquarters is a mile from campus. Yet there is not one physician or scientist here who believed her technology was legit. How investors got played for millions without even talking to an independent scientist, when there were 1000s of local scientists to choose from within spitting distance from Theranos is beyond me. It's hard to feel too much sympathy for someone so wealthy who is that reckless with their wealth. EDIT: Another comment here mentioned Ian Gibbons as a counterexample. (YouTube is not letting me directly reply the comment) Gibbons was not affiliated with Stanford, and as he worked for Theranos, he was hardly in a position to give investors an independent opinion on the technology.

So she changed her entire personality to manipulate investors, going so far as to change her mannerisms voice and looks. Then on the trial she suddenly transforms into this likeable person that all the jurors genuinely "believe in" Sorry but sounds like she just manipulated them as well. And they fell for it.

This one hit close to home for me. I could have died as a result of a test I got from Theranos while I had a serious health condition.

having listened to The Dropout and reading through Bad Blood now, the twist that she decided to blame Sonny for everything that she did was an absolutely disgusting move. even if there was a case of battered wife syndrome to be had there, all of the issues with the blood test designs had been there since BEFORE Sonny ever became involved with the project. the fact she was acquitted on the case of defrauding patients (which was clearly the case as many had to go get retests) is insane to me, that is people's LIVES on the line, not just their dollars. she surrounded herself with yes-men and ignored or harassed anyone who disagreed with her (which was many people). if she actually cared about doing the right thing, she would have listened. she didn't and that is what makes this case so insanely frustrating.

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the jury heard that her product was essentially as accurate as a coin flip and yet they still believed she was genuine based on her testimony. That is incredible. Imagine how effective she could have been if she wasn't a fraud.

Maybe next time a 19 year old with 1 year of undergrad chemistry claims to have invented the 'most disruptive device in the history of medicine' which defies the laws of physics, people will ask more questions before investing...

So the person who literally falsified information, used logos of organizations that were not part of her team to lend her credibility, tried to go around the FDA, etc etc etc, got a free pass on most of the charges because the jury "believed" she was genuine? Do they not feel stupid?