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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.
There goes all that nice Karma. How dare anyone mock the idea that strong, empowered women can do no wrong by virtue of their magic vaginas??
Fscking hell, editors! Paraphrase the title correctly, you cannot.
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?
You're far from the first:
http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/...
The $900M is the value of the COMPANY, not her net worth. They figure the only way to get value out of the company is to liquidate it, and she would get almost none of the proceeds. So HER net worth is $0.
Learn to read. The $9B is the value of the COMPANY, not the value of her stake in the company. She owns only common stock, which is essentially worthless.
...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
What she owns are shared, and if her shares are not preferred, when the company declared bankruptcy what will happen is that all its assets will be liquidated and preferred investors paid first. Nothing will be left for her because of that. Therefore, her net worth is zero.
The argument is that she owns ordinary shares, and while those shares might be kinda sorta worth $100-200M on paper (I can't be bothered to do the calculations...) the reality is she can't sell them (the price would tank if she tried) and if the company goes bankrupt, and Forbes thinks it's very, very, likely it will, then as an ordinary shareholder she'll be last in line to get paid. Bondholders, preferred stock holders, and even the credit card company are ahead of ordinary shareholders when it comes to being paid back after a company is liquidated.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's the valuation of the company. If the editors had made it easier to get the the ACTUAL news report, you could see the explanation, which is that because of the way the investors are paid off before she is, her stake is what's now presumed to be worthless.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ma...
$900M isn't Holmes' net worth; it's the entire net worth of Theranos as a company. Last line of the summary is a bit confusing but what it's saying is that if the company were forced to liquidate all current assets, Holmes would be among the last to get paid. Other investors in the company with preferred shares would be paid first. By the time it gets to the point where Holmes could legally be paid from the liquidation, it's more than likely there'd be nothing left for her to get.
It's an interesting question: how come so many of these "successful females in IT" are just charlatans? For another example the ex-CEO of Reddit, married to an extremely unscrupulous gay man.
Perhaps they view technology as a "social construct"? That's quickly turning into a dog-whistle word for a con-man. Or con-woman, whatever.
Rough numbers:
She owns 45% of the company
45% of 9B = 4B
But...someone else invested 1B, and they have rights to the first 1B in a sale.
If the company is only worth 900M, then all of that 900M is allocated to the investor first, and she get $0.
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.
Mod me down if you wish but I gotta say...All slashdotters seem to do these days is hate, she's actually trying to do something to help the world.
For example, here's an image of her developing an estimation mechanism for calculating the girth of penises, a sorely needed tool that she had a hand in developing for the porn industry:
https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2015/holmes/HolmesGallery1.jpg?lenya.module=svg&height=371&width=556
So the real question is how many slashdotters can make a claim to inventing something as innovative as that? Not many I suspect.
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...
Forbes is estimating that in very likely that Theranos can't recover and the business will fail. In case of a a liquidation bankruptcy proceedings the banks that have loaned it money recover their money first from the sale of the assets, second is the shareholders who hold preferred stocks, these are shareholders that bought shares early on from Holmes to fund Theranos. Once these 2 groups that take precedence are paid back there is essentially nothing left to divide among the common shareholder. In fact it is very likely that there probably isn't even enough to completely cover the preferred shares and they are going to take a loss
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.
Hi, Liz. Why did you make up this "lucm" name?
Do you have ESP?
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
Modern common stock doesn't even have voting rights, and common stock has always had such diluted rights as to effectively have zero. It's also defined as being canceled if the company files bankruptcy; the only real rights you get with common stock are profit sharing, and that is elective (most companies don't pay dividends; the ones that do will cancel their dividend when finances are bad--a wise move, as they need the money for restructuring). Common stock is only worth what you can sell it for on a perceptive secondary security market, where people buy things because they think other people will buy those things from them for more money later.
This woman's net worth is entirely in common stock in her company; she'll get none of it when her company folds. The company is worth apparently $900 million; when it goes under, less than $900 million will be generated by liquidation; the investors will get all of that; she'll get $0.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yeah total bullshit.
After all, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services haven't proposed pulling Theranos's license (and hence qualification to do tests that can be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid), and haven't proposed banning the Theranos founders from running a lab for two years. Oh, wait, they did. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...
After all, the company didn't just throw out all the results done on their machines in 2014 and 2015. Oh, wait, they have. http://www.wsj.com/articles/th...
I have no common cause with the Libertarian neanderthals around here that clearly despise and fear women, but in this case, Theranos looks like little more than a scam. But I wouldn't like that to the CEO being a female, since there are no lack of male-run scam outfits who are briefly market darlings before it's revealed that the company's core technology is a load of unmitigated bullshit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They're actually relevant to the story here!
Please, no Forbes links. I tried to read a Forbes article, and they insisted that I whitelist their site. So I did, and the very first page was filled with blinking and flashing ads. Bad behavior should not be rewarded, so no links to Forbes.
this kind of comment is the modern day equivalent of joining a witch hunt. You use Slashdot buttons instead of a pitch fork, but the spirit and enthusiasm for expedient "justice" is the same. And anyone who gets in your way has to be in cahoots with the witch, right? Zero chance that maybe you're just plain wrong.
lucm, indeed.
The original article was essentially bullshit
If true, then Theranos could quickly debunk their BS by publicly demonstrating their technology in front of credible experts. Please explain why they haven't done that.
No one is going to be paid anything from this, the 'revolutionary' process this company was based on is a fraud. Maybe some of the customers of the unreliable tests that were performed will be compensated in court after liquidation. The non working Edison machine is their only asset. Who would buy that?
[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?
Because you can't prove a fucking negative. They NEVER claimed what the article say
lucm, indeed.
More likely it's the fact that Silicon Valley is a liberal/SJW stronghold, where investors will happily throw money at any company with a female CEO.
As we say in California, what are smoking and where can I get some?
http://valleywag.gawker.com/silicon-valley-named-13th-best-conservative-city-in-ame-1458838034
They never claimed that the lab tests they conducted on their own machines (that they've now thrown out and told doctors to disregard) were accurate?
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!
More likely it's the fact that Silicon Valley is a liberal/SJW stronghold, where investors will happily throw money at any company with a female CEO.
As we say in California, what are smoking and where can I get some?
http://valleywag.gawker.com/silicon-valley-named-13th-best-conservative-city-in-ame-1458838034
GAWKER?!?!?!?!
Yeah, that's a trustworthy source.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ, you scraped right through the bottom of the barrel.
She owns 50% of the company. This is the poster child for diversification of the portfolio.Theranos is private so the stock is only as valuable as the next private market buyer will pay.
Preferred investors get paid first. She only has common stock. So, nothing left for her no matter how much of the company she owns.
Did you think that reactionary fools like you have something to contribute? Delusion and hate are not valuable commodities. They've become far too common since the ignorant Conservatives lost their minds from listening to hate-radio, reading wingnut blogs, and watching Fox News. The damage done to these people is incalculable, they're in a media-driven cult that rejects information and craves absurd propaganda, and they're taking the Republican party down with them by electing increasingly extreme idiots.
Is she a scientologist, too?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Did you read the articles? I don't know why I even bother with this because people are not looking for what this is all about, they're just out for blood like with that fucking gorilla that got killed.
The first article you post has nothing to do with Theranos using an unproven technology. It's essentially an internal letter (not an actual decision) citing issues with lab procedures for a specific incident. None of the R&D stuff at Theranos is related to Medicare coverage.
The second one is just a follow-up from the same bullshit WSJ article that keeps bashing the old prototype (that Edison machine) for things Theranos never claimed it did. It doesn,t bring up new facts at all.
lucm, indeed.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ, you scraped right through the bottom of the barrel.
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
If the tech works then it will be licensed or sold for lots of money as the company tanks. I wouldn't hold my breath on that...
Did you read the articles? I don't know why I even bother with this because people are not looking for what this is all about, they're just out for blood like with that fucking gorilla that got killed.
The first article you post has nothing to do with Theranos using an unproven technology. It's essentially an internal letter (not an actual decision) citing issues with lab procedures for a specific incident. None of the R&D stuff at Theranos is related to Medicare coverage.
The second one is just a follow-up from the same bullshit WSJ article that keeps bashing the old prototype (that Edison machine) for things Theranos never claimed it did. It doesn,t bring up new facts at all.
I did read the articles. How you could honestly think that it's not a big deal if a company whose core purpose is doing blood tests has admitted that the tests they've done aren't reliable, and is facing being barred from doing work for the largest customer for blood test services in the country, then I really don't know what to tell you.
Theranos claimed that their Edison machine (the core of their business) accurately performs blood tests with less blood and at lower cost than competing devices. That's turning out not to be true, at least on the accuracy front. If you don't think accuracy is important, then I've got a ballpoint pen here on my desk. It can perform blood tests using no blood at all, and at trivial cost. Can't vouch that they'll be accurate, though...
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.
y u angry at women bro? are u ... forever alone?
this kind of comment is the modern day equivalent of joining a witch hunt. You use Slashdot buttons instead of a pitch fork, but the spirit and enthusiasm for expedient "justice" is the same. And anyone who gets in your way has to be in cahoots with the witch, right? Zero chance that maybe you're just plain wrong.
Dude, chill. I've seen your history, you're obviously not Liz because you actually comment intelligently on tech stuff.
It was a joke.
Do you have ESP?
Not all ownership is the same. There are common shares and preferred shares. The preferred shares get paid before anyone else. Her shares are common shares and get paid only after every dollar of preferred shares has been paid. Then she only gets 50% of whatever remains. The $900 million they estimated won't cover the preferred shares so she and the other common shareholders won't get anything.
What's it like being a fucking idiot? I'm just curious. Because your attempt at an analogy looks more like a fucking retard trying to string words together in some bizarre facsimile of a rejoinder.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
If only they recorded TEDMED talks and wrote articles concerning them prior to the WSJ article.
Or was the New Yorker conspiring with the WSJ 10 months beforehand, with both of them drugging Holmes into publicly stating gems like:
Do us a favor and specify what you think they never claimed, and I suspect that we can document that they did.
Never made?
Correct. It also includes your debt.
Plenty of people (and companies), homeless or otherwise, have a less-than-zero net worth.
Forbes is relying on the written law to figure that out. But this is the age of Obama. As we saw with the GM bankruptcy proceedings during the auto bailout, the government can order the bankruptcy judge to ignore the law and pay whomever the government wants paid. This allowed the union to get paid before shareholders despite the law saying the shareholders had priority.
There is no liar like a right-wing AC liar. In the GM bankruptcy proceeding debts were paid in strict accordance with the law. The bondholders (not shareholders) that were upset about not getting preferential treatment were unsecured creditors, unlike the banks that did get paid off first, and had no seniority in settling GM's obligations. They were in the same asset category as the union to whom GM owed a lot of money, and it is up the administrator of the filing to determine how the parties in the same category get treated.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
This is normal practice. Common shares get to vote, preferred do not. The CEO needs/expects to have voting power in her/his own company. The issuance of preferred shares is how venture capital is attracted. Venture capitalists don't really care a fig about the future of the company, its technology, or anything -- they just want to get paid and won't invest unless they are first in line for payment.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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
I would however suggest that you have a common cause with some group, due to your use of a several highly derogatory terms for people who apparently do not agree with you, but hey.
More to the point, I think a major reason people are giving the responses they are to this long slow train wreck of Theranos is how Ms Holmes was held up to be such a glowing example of the truth and light behind women in business by certain groups. It has become quite apparently that this particular train wreck mostly comes down to her belief that hype and contacts has a billion dollar market value, and others supporting her in this. It is quite clear looking back at the hype machine that a good quantity of that has come from 'And look, she is a woman!', so that is a factor, one that she was quite happy to play.
The takeaway here should really be 'step carefully before you raise someone to sainthood for your cause'. This is of course a common mistake, especially these days (by many many different types of groups of course).
The interesting part comes next - Do the people who truly believe in their cause try and shout down any detraction of her as being sexist, or do they quietly admit there is some egg-on-face here and that she was not the saint she was held up to be. Time will tell.
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.
Can you explain how you link is relevant? Exact quote and how it constitutes a rebuttal of my point?
lucm, indeed.
But that's not what is being disputed! Are you unaware that Theranos is a private lab that does all kinds of tests, and this whole finger prick thing is taken out of context and spinned as if that's actual core business?
Look at their website:
https://www.theranos.com/test-...
They are researching ways to get more tests per blood sample, and they invented procedures and equipment for that. The "detect cancer from a drop of blood" is not what they do on a daily basis, it's part of their R&D program. But the WSJ made it look like they claim to do all their tests with that experimental technology, then ridicule them when they try to explain why they do tests with "normal" equipment.
lucm, indeed.
They never claimed that it's ready. They've said over and over that the prototype was flawed and no longer considered, that they were working on new avenues.
These people are truly working to improve lab testing (which is their actual business), it's not a startup that does nothing but try to invent a new thing. They do millions of regular tests, for less money than the competition, and they should be praised for that, not bashed because some of their R&D programs are not yet viable.
lucm, indeed.
Theranos claimed that their Edison machine (the core of their business) accurately performs blood tests with less blood and at lower cost than competing devices. That's turning out not to be true, at least on the accuracy front.
Accuracy: that's the key point. The WSJ make it look like Theranos is using that technology to do all their tests, and that's simply not true. Even on the limited number of tests designed to work with this new method, they stopped using that prototype a while ago.
The big point of the WSJ is that no outside lab has reviewed the secret test procedure. They have compared results (and they come "within spitting distance" as described in the article) but the external labs were not allowed to see how those tests were performed, and the article make it look suspicious. But it's like saying that iPhones may or may not make phone calls properly because Apple didn't share their source code with Samsung. It's absurd.
lucm, indeed.
Venture capitalists don't really care a fig about the future of the company, its technology, or anything -- they just want to get paid and won't invest unless they are first in line for payment.
Plus they don't really care about voting, since they hold the purse strings and can pretty much dictate how things are run from a practical perspective.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Worst thing is, I don't like her, and part of me can't help but feel vindicated that her own "I'm the Steve Jobs of biotech" persona is backfiring, big time. I was truly disgusted by her attitude during interviews prior to the WSJ article, she reminded me of Marissa Mayer.
I used to work for an investment bank that makes shitloads of money (like billions and billions, year over year) but is never in the news, unlike the competition which hold press conferences and goes on TV shows, often bragging about returns or technology that is significantly less impressive. The reason my former employer keeps a low profile is that once you publicly brag about something, you're on the radar of the media, and you're a target when the rainy days come - and the media tend to use nukes, not sniper rifles. Maybe Mrs Holmes has learned that by now.
As for this latest "news", what is it, really? A made up valuation that has zero basis in reality and no actual financial impact has now been revised by the people who made it up, based on controversy that very few people take the time to thoroughly examine. This is nothing but clickbait built upon clickbait, yet we get the constant flow of Slashdot experts chiming in without having even the most basic understanding of the real issue. I guess this is how the world works, I should get into the clickbait business instead of bitching about it.
lucm, indeed.
The original article was essentially bullshit ...
Based on the WSJ's coverage, Theranos retracted previous tests results and the FDA threatened to shut them down. I don't claim to know the details of the Theranos technology, but those two facts are enough to be very suspicious of the company.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Oh, but it is what is being disputed. Nobody valued Theranos at $9 billion dollars because they were copying Labcorp's business model. Walgreens did not enter into a partnership with Theranos because Theranos would provide a phebotomist on site to draw multiple 5mL samples and ship them to Theranos.
Yes. Researching using commerical samples resulting in the invalidation of two years of sample results in one fell swoop.
Yet again, nobody is interested in a startup that performs tests with "normal" equipment. Theranos touted this very capability in 2014 as something the could already do, not as a multi-year research project.
"And we're able to do all the testing using just a single microsample, rather than having to draw a dedicated tube for each type of test."
So if I got a blood test and my doctor saw the results and wanted other tests done, I wouldn't have to have more blood drawn?
"Exactly. And on their lab form, the physician can write, "If a given result is out of range, run this follow-up test." And it can all be done immediately, using that same sample."
Keep 'em coming. Theranos provided lots of PR material that contradicts you... you just have to specify what they supposedly didn't claim and I can search for more documentation saying otherwise.
I'm sorry, but you need actually specify your point first - what part of "debunking claims that Theranos never made" concerns a claim that Theranos never made, exact quote and how the WSJ article was incorrect?
That TEDMED talk is chock full of claims. Appears pretty relevant to the rest of us.
And just when would that be? Because the FDA reports that they were using Edison devices in June 2015, and those limited number of tests were the ones whos results were invalidated for all of 2014 and 2015.
So please, provide a source for when they "stopped using that prototype." Because I'm thinking they stopped when CMS told them to in 2016, and Theranos went into deperate survival mode.
The original article was essentially bullshit ...
Based on the WSJ's coverage, Theranos retracted previous tests results and the FDA threatened to shut them down. I don't claim to know the details of the Theranos technology, but those two facts are enough to be very suspicious of the company.
Those events are unrelated. Theranos is a private lab and they do regular tests on regular equipment; they apparently had bad QA procedures in at least one of their labs, which caused the issue with federal authorities. This has nothing to do with their secret technology (although it doesn't inspire confidence). They do millions of tests for less money than other labs but with the same kind of equipment.
Meanwhile they also have this R&D program that aims at getting more test results out of smaller blood samples. That technology has been used only in a small number of tests, and the earlier prototype they used proved to give faulty results, and when they found out they invalidated the tests done with that machine.
The problem is that the WSJ article and later follow-up by lazy reporters "merged" these things and made it look like all tests at Theranos are done on experimental technology and that they covered the problems by redoing tests on regular equipment.
I don't give a shit about Theranos, and if I needed tests I wouldn't use them because of all those QA problems. But the way this story has been spinned by the WSJ makes me wonder about how often reporters misrepresent things to make their stories more exciting. Either that or they're total tools, and eiher way I'll never trust that newspaper again.
lucm, indeed.
Appears pretty relevant to the rest of us.
If you believe you can talk for "the rest of you" there's no wonder you can't tell what the issue is.
If you haven't done so, watch the interview. She calmly explains things point by point. If after watching this interview you still believe they're a bunch of crooks making false claims and getting caught lying, there's nothing more I can do to make you understand.
http://www.wsj.com/video/full-...
lucm, indeed.
The FDA was involved at the demand of the Theranos to validate their test tubes, not the Edison technology. And Theranos limited the tests to herpes until they would get the thumbs up from fhe FDA.
Watch the fucking interview she explains that part in details in the first few minutes, including the inspection in the summer.
http://www.wsj.com/video/full-...
If you think it's easy to get something approved by a federal agency you're unaware of all the tedious, expensive and endless hoops they make people jump through. It's not just a pass/fail inspection, it's a grueling process that takes forever. Taking one element of this and spinning it as "FDA thinks that..." is ridiculous, and as you will see there's absolutely no one from the FDA who went on the record to support that statement.
lucm, indeed.
We don't have true equality just because competent women can become CEOs. We're more equal when female scam artists can become CEOs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hint: shareholders are the last to get paid, preferred shares before common shares, and this has been the law for a long time. The shareholders are the owners of the business, and they get whatever's left* once all the debts are paid off. Money owed to employees is debt, and has to be paid before anything is left for shareholders.
*Chapter VII bankruptcy happens when the company owes more than the worth of its assets, and isn't expected to recover, so unless there's unusual circumstances the debtors won't get paid in full and there will be nothing for the shareholders.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, both right wing and left wing politics have been full of both delusion and hate. The term "Regressive Left" exists for a reason.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ, you scraped right through the bottom of the barrel.
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
New enough that they haven't created an account yet and are having to post as an Anonymous Coward.
Can you explain how you link is relevant? Exact quote and how it constitutes a rebuttal? Yet again - you are saying that Theranos never claimed certain things. An half hour interview published after the WSJ article does nothing to show that they didn't claim something before the article.
You can gleefully ignore the nanotainer "pause," the Edison device quality control issues, and the fact that their only commercial partners -- who have an actual financial interest in what Theranos can and cannot do -- are fleeing for the hills. But you're essentially alone in that stance. The FDA does not agree, Medicare does not agree, and Walgreens does not agree. They have no chance for an IPO at this point, and the valuation that will be applied during their next funding tranche, assuming that they aren't driven into bankruptcy first, is going to be a small, small fraction of that applied last year. Because, again, nobody was valuing Theranos at $9B due to their ability to lose money by performing the same tests as LabCorp at below-cost rates.
The FDA was involved in both, you tool. Try reading the linked articles for a change. The nanotainers were the subject of the October 2015 FDA findings and the Edison device test results the March 2016 FDA findings. The latter, specifically concerning the quality control and operating of Edison machines, caused Theranos to invalidate all Edison machine-generated test results in 2015-2016. Now Theranos is being sued over those invalidated results.
The "fucking interview" conducted in October 2015 is incapable of addressing the FDA reports released in March 2016. They are two different situations. Deal with it.
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
Indeed, I am a libertarian, you dirty anarcho capitalist scum*, and my philosophy has approximately zero in the way of even caring about somebody's gender beyond 'why the hell should we poke our noses in?' because the republicans and democrats care.
* ;)
I don't read AC A human right
That was kind of my attitude towards the legislation about bathroom use. Who cares? Who is going to check to make sure you don't have dangly bits when you are entering the women's room?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Plus, if you're a lesbian creeping it up in the women's room, or a gay guy creeping up the men's room, there are still legal solutions to that problem.
Note: I'm NOT saying that homosexual people are creepers. I'm saying that IF you happen to get somebody who's both, or just that fucked up, the problem is fixable under current rules in at least most states. There might be a state that has fucked up laws.
Personally, I'm for unisex bathrooms - beef up the stalls, provide a changing room, call it a day.
I don't read AC A human right