Slashdot Mirror
Forbes Just Cut Its Estimate of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes's Net Worth From $4.5 Billion To Zero (qz.com)
It wasn't long agon when Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, was regarded as one of the U.S.'s most successful female entrepreneurs with Forbes estimating her net work to be $4.5 billion. Thanks to all the evidence that Theranos' technology is largely a gimmick and false advertising, the publication has revised that figure to essentially zero, reports Quartz. From the report: Last year, Forbes pegged its value at $9 billion, based on the sale of stakes to investors. Since that lofty estimate, Theranos has been battered by bad news (paywalled; alternate source), starting with reports in the Wall Street Journal in October that its tests were inaccurate. That triggered an inquiry from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which proposed banning Holmes from the industry. Forbes went back to its slide rule and, after talking to venture capitalists and industry experts, recalculated Theranos' value at $900 million, based on its intellectual property and money it has already raised. "At such a low valuation, Holmes' stake is essentially worth nothing," Matt Herper writes. That's because Theranos' other investors own preferred shares, and since Holmes owns common shares, they would get paid first if the company were forced to liquidate.
Just thought I would be the first, though certainly not the last.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Snake oil is snake oil - from what stories I've read, Theranos did demos of their setup taking the samples out of the room without showing potential investors the actual tech at work - and people *still* bought into it?
Fscking hell, editors! Paraphrase the title correctly, you cannot.
Am I missing something here? Her net worth was valued at about $4,000,000,000 and about 1/4 of that is essentially 0?
I wish I had essentially 0 dollars...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
What I need to ask is, did the value actually exist in the first place if it could disappear so quickly when things went sour?
Cut from $9,000,000,000 to $900,000,000.
I'd like essential zero dollars if that's the world we're living in.
...such as this is in deep, deep trouble.
Whatever happened to the value of good honest labour?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm surprised that it has that high a value at all, given that their legal and accounting expenses must be tremendous (even if they were somehow to win every lawsuit against them) and their liability insurance provider is doubtless going to fight them over every single claim.
The real question is whether Holmes was as good at deceiving herself as she was at deceiving others. If she was, her net worth may indeed be limited to personal property (which certainly she'll get to keep since it's very difficult to confiscate personal property from the wealthy), but if she was aware of just how much of it was all smoke and mirrors, then I'm sure she found ways to hide as much as she could.
What she really needs to do is declare that she's found religion, write a book, and then become a talk show guest.
They're actually relevant to the story here!
The original article was essentially bullshit, using people who worked at Theranos for 2 weeks 5 years ago as "internal sources", and debunking claims that Theranos never made. What they did was like posting a story saying that the Linux kernel doesn't "truly" prevent computers from being infected by viruses (a claim nobody ever made) and that the GNU didn't it grant it a GPLv3 license.
I don't know if this total incompetence or if there's a hidden agenda, or maybe it is in fact a case of blatant sexism, but the coverage of Theranos by the Wall Street journal is awful and careless. And the other big media gobbled this up without thinking twice about it.
There was a video interview of Holmes by some grinning moron from the WSJ posted on Slashdot a while ago. Anyone watching that video could see that this whole story is essentially sensationalistic reporting with no basis in reality. But who cares about facts, it's much easier to call that girl a crook and move on to the next scandal.
I actually cancelled my Audible subscription to the WSJ after watching that interview and doing my own research into this story. Who knows what proportion of their stories are full of bullshit like this one. They remind me of that guy from the movie Shattered Glass.
lucm, indeed.
What I don't get is did no one bother to see if her so-called game changing blood tests actually WORKED? I get the impression, no
I'm just kind of dumbfounded that no one thought to check with some actual PhDs, MDs, researchers, etc.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Props to Slashdot Editors for not linking the paywalled source by default this time. Thanks for listening.
Normally hate posts like this, but... How is this news for nerds?
[An] economy built on pipe dreams such as this is in deep, deep trouble.
Once people stop dreaming our economy will stall to a level not seen in hundreds of years. Most of human history has shown a 1-2% rate of economic advancement until the industrial age. The dreamers are the ones who have given us the advancements our ancestors 200 years ago couldn't even have dreamed of.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
So Theiranus was full of shit?
American idiots. As usual.
Perhaps they meant "her network" instead of "her net worth"...
When you account for potential criminal defense legal fees.
The dead giveaway on Theranos is the splurging of publicity in mass mainstream media without anything at all published in relevant peer-reviewed specialist journals.
As soon as anyone asks why they would do that, the answer is obvious. You'd think.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
Is she a scientologist, too?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Thanks to all the evidence that Theranos' technology is largely a gimmick and false advertising
Theranos's main product, by the way, is a blood-testing device, which may or may not actually work as well as Theranos says it does.
You could have at least briefly hinted at this in the summary.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So who's going to prison? Not for harming shareholders (who cares about them!). But for injuring/killing countless people who used their faulty tests to make medical decisions?
That should be the real story here. Create a false company, pull in $9B of investment money, generate life-threatening product, go to prison. At least, that's how it should work.
But TRUMP is still worth north of $10 billion, thanks to his mastery of The Art of the Deal!
Why do you hate women so!?
You know over 50% of trades on the markets are made by algorithms? just computers trading with other computers looking at little changes in prices
Tech visionary and genius Elizabeth Holmes is changing the medical landscape!. Specialising in nanotechnology, she successfully shrunk her wealth from $4.5 billion to zero. Book her now!!!
[An] economy built on pipe dreams such as this is in deep, deep trouble.
Once people stop dreaming our economy will stall to a level not seen in hundreds of years. Most of human history has shown a 1-2% rate of economic advancement until the industrial age.
Not hardly. Before the Industrial Revolution the economic growth rate was 0.1-0.2%, one tenth of what you suggest (actually over the very long term it was just 0.01%). After the IR growth rates shot up to almost 1% initially, eventually reaching 2-3% annually in some decades of the 19th Century (see The Handbook of Economic Growthby Steven Durlauf, Philippe Aghion, 2013, chapter 5).
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Forbes estimating her net work to be $4.5 billion
Man, that's a lot of Cisco gear.
It is widely discussed that oil price is rather stable measured in gold. So by this line of though it is not oil price that fluctuates but rather dollar value. Recently revealed conspiracy of banks to manipulate dollar gold price adds yet another dimension to this speculation
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
She has a vagina, tits, and mouth. She's worth something to someone or many someones. Fuck you Forbes.
Has she sold any shares? Bought a house perhaps?
Why are most of these posts repeating the same shit? Did you all post within seconds of each other?
As you say, there's lots of scam artists out there. Holmes doesn't hold a candle on Bernie Madoff, for example.
But still, I think one could make the argument that she used her gender to increase her success. Madoff, for example, used his being Jewish to seem more trustworthy in the Jewish community, allowing him to obtain more investors. She could have done the same with the 'feminist' community, who may have invested in her, at least partially, as a political statement.
Same deal with her deliberately manipulating her image to create associations with Steve Jobs.
Personally I'm saddened she turned out to be a fraud. I was so hyped about the possibility of 'hundreds of medical tests on a chip!'.
I don't read AC A human right