Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
In the "Notes" app on the iphone, there is a note which says "msg me on X". Back then, it was Twitter. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
If only google could use their AI to generate a wiremesh model out of their google maps streetview data, and make it public. And then another model to generate texture.
It's so strange to see this here. I remember when this site was nothing but foaming-at-the-mouth fawning adoration of Elizabeth Holmes long after her scams were exposed.
My first memory of her being mentioned on this site was the dawning skepticism followed by the big expose. But it's possible I missed the fawning because it didn't sound as interesting
A lot of the comments on that thread are about how the board is full of military/CIA it smells like a cover company. It had Henry Kissinger on it of all people.
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
One of the unspoken secrets of research is that a lot of people are doing it to keep themselves in a job. It is perfectly possible to do research for years which goes nowhere, just goes over old ground etc. As long as the money rolls in, someone's making a living and not necessarily dishonestly if they're at the lower levels.
I have a theory! They saw all the other security state people involved, and figured this was something it would be a good career move to support without knowing exactly why.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
I need to delete that key again. I keep recreating it with the same value, but nothing seems to work. I want to use this key with the value but in a way that nobody else knows the value. Sigh. Security is difficult.
For those who are curious, Elizabeth Holmes was originally charged to serve for 11 years and 3 months. However, now her projected release date is just right around the corner - 2030. That's just 6 years and 9 months. A little more than half of her original serving period.
I don’t know about this particular case, but sentences are usually reduced to 3/4 or 2/3 depending on a bunch of factors referred to as good behavior. Unless a judge or a law explicitly disallows that depending on the crime or the sentencing. The amount varies by state or court type and judges usually account for that when deciding on the sentencing
Federal criminal convicts usually serve 85-90% with good behavior, at least for men. The minimum is 85%. There is no federal parole. I think she's getting out early for a different reason.
A lot of prisoners get released after about half their sentence when they become eligible for parole, so 12 years is really 6 (and life is really 20) in a lot of cases. Fraud is a white collar crime and basically everyone gets out on parole first or second try.
The only ones who don't are murderers, gang members, drug dealers or whistleblowers. The American legal system judges crimes on how far from "normal behavior" they are, not how much harm they cause.
You know, for a single pretty rare case of fraud in tech, as opposed to the industries where fraud is common, this gets brought up an excessive amount a decade later.
The "tech" sector label is a fraud in its own right.
It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.
For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.
* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.
* Sexism.
If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.
- Create a series of increasingly surreal reality TV shows that blur the distinctions between how we see ourselves and how we present to the world as characters.
- Convince a reality-distorting corporate sociopath that my experience making these shows makes me the ideal person to tell her misunderstood story to the world in a breakthrough documentary film.
- Use an advance screening of the film to generate publicity for this previously obscure AI document management startup.
Where’s the party? I just built something similar to your product for an SF-based non-profit (fully self-hosted on site) and it’s been extremely useful. Would love to get tips on how we can improve our setup.
Not that it matters or anyone cares, but it's so obvious Balwani was manipulating her emotionally. There are so many instances where he says "Love you", or "love" or "I am in love with your beauty", while she is more direct like "I love you", "I am in love with you" etc.
hmm..perhaps I was biased because I watched a couple of documentaries, a tv film and read the book by John Carreyrou "Bad Blood", so my eyes were primed to look for this pattern.
But he was definitely manipulative in this regard.
In my genearl observations of office desks/cubicles around me I have noticed that the only people with carefully stacked books, often more than one or two, were the ones who didn't really read.
It is a bit hilarious that most of the "apps" open faster in a fake desktop simulated inside the browser than it actually does natively on my Macbook Pro
As someone who only knows Theranos by the creepy lady and that they did some scam this is very interesting. Only critique is that it calls Twitter X, which isn't historically accurate.
EDIT: uhh I thought the movie signup thing was a gag, didn't know it was real. Sorry I guess.
Why are people giving her anymore attention and time? Yawn. I don't get it. The story has been told, there is nothing new here besides some weird shots of her wide eyed like she always has been. Am I the only person who isn't impressed?
Fascinating that the only communications with Tyler Schultz, which was the main insider confronting the fraud, had all of ~4 exchanges with her. All in the same day.
Truly brave of him to go against the golden geese, despite turning his own family- and even former attorney generals & military officers- against him.
Its all on 4/11/2014.
Also interesting to see how Sunny & Holmes always thought it was Tyler, or the CLIA Lab Director (Adam) plotting against them.... when their scam was just in plain sight of regulators that bothered to actually do the work.
Holmes/Sunny reaction to Tyler's email and to Adam's resignation (Nov 2014) is one of outrage. Using the power inbalance to make their point, is 101 fraud.
Sunny's response to Tyler's email, the one full of sincere concern for the well-being of the company:
Tyler.
We saw your email to Elizabeth.
Before I get into specifics, let me share with you that had this email come from anyone else in the company, I would have already held them accountable for the arrogant and patronizing tone and reckless comments. In your case, I am giving you the benefit of doubt that your intentions are in the right place, and am taking the time to respond, even though your tone in this email all the way through the last paragraph is not that of someone seeking to understand, but rather someone standing at higher perch of morality and business wisdom. Perhaps this too was not your intent but this clearly comes across as your mind set.
See my comments in red below.
From Elizabeth's Sent mailbox, 10/26/2015:
> Theranos is a revolutionary business, founded and led by a remarkable engineer and businesswoman - joined by a team of professionals who have, at their core, embraced her mission to serve humanity through innovation in health care.
4 lines and only the last 2 words tell us what they do
What they pretended to do more like it.
This is great, it reminds me of promotional websites from the Adobe Flash era. Ads were a lot more fun back then.
make ads fun again
MAFA
Make Ads Fun & Interesting Again - MAFIA
Make ads go away
They replaced the old space jam website with a boring href to a yt of the trailer :(
https://www.spacejam.com/
It’s still there if you close that out: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
I cant believe they've done this. They didnt even use iframes.
It should be trivial to reauthor .swf content to modern web standards.
https://github.com/sv1sjp/flash-swf-to-html5-toolkit
In the "Notes" app on the iphone, there is a note which says "msg me on X". Back then, it was Twitter. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
good catch, i may need to find a new job soon
[Scoff, Scoff]
What are we to believe this is some sort of, snort heh* magic iPhone or something?
She was truly ahead of her time.
its still called twitter
(for some of us)
I will never call it X and die violently on this hill
How about Xitter? :)
pronounced "shitter"?
I've accepted X and call the posts "crements"
it's just kinda awkward, but worse than just "X" is the fact that now you're supposed to call tweets "posts on X" or "X posts"
like come on... it was so good before
If Elon Musk can deadname, we can too.
I'd love to agree with you but that look like the site designer asking for feedback on his site
“X” was actually a pre-Twitter BBS focused on transgenics and corpuscular macronutrients, based in Fort Worth. Any true believers would know that.
Whoa. With a lidar scan of my house, a drone-captured point cloud of my neighborhood, and a backup of my icloud, I could create an immersive 3D snapshot of my life. And then what if other people did the same and we networked them together, so that we can actually interact in the snapshot. It'd be like second life except actually cloned from real lives. weird
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
Bro just go outside
no sorry have to keep in touch with agents
Who else is gonna type “just implement it” or press enter repeatedly
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
Ref: https://flyawaysimulation.com/ask/answers/microsoft-flight-s...
I think they cheat somewhat with the ocean when far from labdy
I love doing flybys of my house in MSFS
In that case generative AI could be defended as a privacy preserving measure, I guess.
If only google could use their AI to generate a wiremesh model out of their google maps streetview data, and make it public. And then another model to generate texture.
You could pitch the idea to Zuck, see if he wants to burn $100b to try it out.
No please. Not again.
Why not, it's big tech money, at least share it with the poor.
It seems we will be having gaussian-splatted 3D world soon.
eg. https://www.nianticspatial.com/products/capture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-S-x0b9TrE
And then you realize how boring it is.
That is exactly the idea of some minecraft projects: Mapping the entire world into minecraft.
I mean Second Life has been around since 2003... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
I wasted a lot of hours in it when I was a teen.
It's so strange to see this here. I remember when this site was nothing but foaming-at-the-mouth fawning adoration of Elizabeth Holmes long after her scams were exposed.
My first memory of her being mentioned on this site was the dawning skepticism followed by the big expose. But it's possible I missed the fawning because it didn't sound as interesting
I posted about Theranos 2013. Not entirely sure, but I think it was when they launched publicly.
Crazy how my gut feeling was more than vindicated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349
A lot of the comments on that thread are about how the board is full of military/CIA it smells like a cover company. It had Henry Kissinger on it of all people.
Did we ever find out what all those people were doing at Theranos? I really haven’t kept up to date.
One of the unspoken secrets of research is that a lot of people are doing it to keep themselves in a job. It is perfectly possible to do research for years which goes nowhere, just goes over old ground etc. As long as the money rolls in, someone's making a living and not necessarily dishonestly if they're at the lower levels.
I have a theory! They saw all the other security state people involved, and figured this was something it would be a good career move to support without knowing exactly why.
"Don't obey in advance", Tim Snyder said. But obeying in advance is called showing initiative and is a great career move. In secretive industries it can be hard to know what to obey in advance, but they don't let that stop them!
This is an ad for her upcoming, self-starred documentary. So nothing much has changed?
I left some snaps on your iphone, so see we can stare into each other's eyes Liz.
Why do I have Nathan Fielder's look in my face (same when he was staring at as EH on the pilot), as I'm going through all the features on this site?
Hope you're lounging on somebody else's bed too, while you're doing that. :D
All I feel is that UI of MacOS and iOS is so inferior now than it was then... :\
only because it was. We peaked with skeuomorphism at the turn of millenium.
If only apps were opening in an instant, odd feeling of having it on random website but not have it natively.
Same, but for that generation of MacBook Air. Insane quality and value for the price. And you didn't have to wait 6 weeks to get them!
Although I bet Lizzie used a Pro..
Burying the api key in notes on the laptop is a nice touch.
I need to delete that key again. I keep recreating it with the same value, but nothing seems to work. I want to use this key with the value but in a way that nobody else knows the value. Sigh. Security is difficult.
For those who are curious, Elizabeth Holmes was originally charged to serve for 11 years and 3 months. However, now her projected release date is just right around the corner - 2030. That's just 6 years and 9 months. A little more than half of her original serving period.
What explains the time reduction?
I don’t know about this particular case, but sentences are usually reduced to 3/4 or 2/3 depending on a bunch of factors referred to as good behavior. Unless a judge or a law explicitly disallows that depending on the crime or the sentencing. The amount varies by state or court type and judges usually account for that when deciding on the sentencing
Federal criminal convicts usually serve 85-90% with good behavior, at least for men. The minimum is 85%. There is no federal parole. I think she's getting out early for a different reason.
A lot of prisoners get released after about half their sentence when they become eligible for parole, so 12 years is really 6 (and life is really 20) in a lot of cases. Fraud is a white collar crime and basically everyone gets out on parole first or second try.
The only ones who don't are murderers, gang members, drug dealers or whistleblowers. The American legal system judges crimes on how far from "normal behavior" they are, not how much harm they cause.
Super slick buried Extend marketing
thank you!!
we parsed all the theranos PDF filings with Extend (https://extend.ai/) and wanted a fun interactive way of visualizing them!
Took me a while to figure out why, till I opened Safari read "document processing" and it clicked. Good job.
thanks!
Did we get their emails? Would be interesting to tease out the differences between the Enron culture and the Theranos culture (and similarities)
there's even an extend api key in there (invalid though, would've been cool if it did something special)
Landed on it like 3 clicks in and immediately closed the page.
You know, for a single pretty rare case of fraud in tech, as opposed to the industries where fraud is common, this gets brought up an excessive amount a decade later.
Tech? Not the health sector?
The "tech" sector label is a fraud in its own right.
It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.
For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.
That's fair, I guess it depends on how you divide it.
Theranos was first funded and mentored by Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. She's 100% tech.
It's hard to forget when the "pretty rare" (citation needed) case was also shoved down your throat by the fawning media for 5 years first.
Two theories:
* It was off-the-charts brazen, and amazing that so many prestigious people got behind it, and that it took so long for anyone blow the whistle/notice that the impossible product didn't in fact exist.
* Sexism.
If you want me to believe #2, I would like to hear what you think are the more comparable cases which don't get bought up as much as this one.
[flagged]
Feels like they are unintentionally marketing the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary rather than themselves.
Llllllllllllol?
Maybe creating the documentary was the most ambitious Nathan For You episode yet, and all simply to build publicity for this company.
The plan…
- Create a series of increasingly surreal reality TV shows that blur the distinctions between how we see ourselves and how we present to the world as characters.
- Convince a reality-distorting corporate sociopath that my experience making these shows makes me the ideal person to tell her misunderstood story to the world in a breakthrough documentary film.
- Use an advance screening of the film to generate publicity for this previously obscure AI document management startup.
Reddit is full of EH content lately, now this.
All of this must be a marketing campaign for the movie.
and most of it pumped years ago through JRE
Wait, this isn't marketing for the documentary?
Yes but intentionally:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013534
I mean, fair play? I appreciate marketing that has effort involved, especially these days.
You do have to get your word out somehow
I would prefer if they were upfront about it so I could just not click on it.
The event they're hosting is a free watch party for the movie. You didn't exactly crack the case.
At least this is a fun ad. I appreciate the level of commitment the developers put into it. It's not just vibe coded slop which is rare
A24 (the studio behind the movie) is one of our customers, so we're hosting a watch party in SF
plus, we used our APIs to parse all the theranos PDFs to power the experience
hope our content marketing made your day a bit more fun!
Where’s the party? I just built something similar to your product for an SF-based non-profit (fully self-hosted on site) and it’s been extremely useful. Would love to get tips on how we can improve our setup.
It's an amazing site - well done.
I mean this in the best way possible: This reminds me so much of Microsoft Bob if it had survived to 2016.
Sneaky and a little icky, but novel enough to pass.
The page crashes instantly in Safari on iOS on an iPhone 13.
looking into it!
Works great on my iPhone 13.
Doesn’t load at all on an iPhone 7
The memory limit for Safari on iOS is less than 400 MB so it's probably because of that
Not that it matters or anyone cares, but it's so obvious Balwani was manipulating her emotionally. There are so many instances where he says "Love you", or "love" or "I am in love with your beauty", while she is more direct like "I love you", "I am in love with you" etc.
I don't see how either of your examples are necessarily more direct than the other?
hmm..perhaps I was biased because I watched a couple of documentaries, a tv film and read the book by John Carreyrou "Bad Blood", so my eyes were primed to look for this pattern.
But he was definitely manipulative in this regard.
In my genearl observations of office desks/cubicles around me I have noticed that the only people with carefully stacked books, often more than one or two, were the ones who didn't really read.
It is a bit hilarious that most of the "apps" open faster in a fake desktop simulated inside the browser than it actually does natively on my Macbook Pro
*yes i know, not apples to apples.
Man, was not prepared to come across a Sparklehorse track randomly tonight.
I love how incredibly vapid the emails and text messages are.
And by love I of course mean: I love, LOVE, LOVE, [repeat ad nauseam]
Nails on a chalkboard.
The reminders section is the second most entertaining bit after the messages. Look it up. It's hilarious!!!
yay i'm glad people are finding all the easter eggs!
Blew my mind away.....
This is remarkably well-made, I love these little simulator dealies.
The setting is unsettling. Remind me of some old horror flash games i used to play.
This is inspired by jmail.world, which may have been inspired itself.
It is obviously not as interesting as jmail.world, but, give her time
Ok I'm a pretty passionate anti-advertising advocate, but if advertising is gonna look like anything, it might as well be this!
thank you :)
Someone posted this[0], a couple of days ago. It was an old marketing ploy for a company called Veracity.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932236
Genuinely curious: does anyone know if the backers ever got refunded?
Love the camera jump scare. Genius
i'm glad someone found it!!
Might be the most tasteful ad I've seen in a hot minute, not bad at all.
The iPhone works and you can even play/listen to music on it!
Even the Theranos machine
this site is so slick great job! love how the email in the iphone works
there's too many easter eggs to count, I didn't even realize that one existed
thank you :))
playfulness is the key
I finished the juice. Now what ?
LOL
Excellent work! All the best for the documentary launch!
thank you for the kind words!!
The juice was great. Now I have to pee. Where do I click? Can the machine analyze it?
Best ad I've seen in a very long time, but I'm mildly disappointed I couldn't load the juice into the Theranos machine
I spent way to much time with that :-D
I took a photo on the iPhone of Elizabeth Holmes and myself hanging out smoking a joint together!
The share button let me download it.
Kinda cool, but also annoying that it's just backdoor marketing for a b2b SaaS company.
Bo you are a legend!!!
There is no way to run for the door.
you can click on the drink to take a sip btw
I checked the health app on the phone:
> No health data.
:)
Very cool!
interesting seeing marketing content do so well on HN haha, not bad!
As someone who only knows Theranos by the creepy lady and that they did some scam this is very interesting. Only critique is that it calls Twitter X, which isn't historically accurate.
EDIT: uhh I thought the movie signup thing was a gag, didn't know it was real. Sorry I guess.
Context please. What is this?
Why are people giving her anymore attention and time? Yawn. I don't get it. The story has been told, there is nothing new here besides some weird shots of her wide eyed like she always has been. Am I the only person who isn't impressed?
woah this is such a throwback, made me oddly nostalgic. great fucking work
thank you!!
Now do Epstein's Laptop!