US Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos's Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani (wsj.com)

John Carreyrou, reporting for WSJ: Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company's former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and also defrauded doctors and patients. The indictments of Ms. Holmes and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Theranos's former president and chief operating officer who was also Ms. Holmes's boyfriend, are the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, sparked by articles in The Wall Street Journal that raised questions about the company's technology and practices. Ms. Holmes, 34 years old, and Mr. Balwani, 53, were charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud in an indictment handed up Thursday and unsealed Friday.

Comments

Actual Indictment

[HockeyPuck]

All the juicy details are in the indictment.

John Carreyrou

[Jodka]

"sparked by articles in The Wall Street Journal that raised questions about the company's technology and practices."

Those articles were written by John Carreyrou who is interviewed about Theranos by Nick Gillespie in this video. The video also provides a lot of background information. I was already familiar with the story but still found the video fascinating.

Additionally, Carreyrou has a new book out about Theranos, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Have not read that, but it gets 5/5 stars with currently 257 customer reviews at Amazon.

Re:John Carreyrou

[BigDukeSix]

I've read the book. The details are so much worse than anything you have read in the news articles about Theranos.

Theranos never developed *anything*. Their automated super-high-tech lab system was a commercially available 3-axis glue dispenser that they stuck pipettes onto. I tried to imagine what it must have been like as a new hire, getting fed the "change the world" crap and signing on with the company, and then seeing the cover opened on that kludge for the first time.

But of course almost no one saw the working innards of the machine, because Balwani the too old boyfriend created a compartmentalized, CIA like structure where no one was allowed to talk to each other. The engineers building the system's microfluidics weren't allowed to talk to the biochemists who were working on the tests. How could that possibly work?

And then anyone who questioned the plan or the message got fired. So many people got fired; whole teams got fired. People went on demos and saw them fail! Any mention of failure? Fired.

IMO, the one person most responsible for this whole debacle who has not yet been held to account is Channing Robertson, who was a senior engineering faculty at Stanford and upon whose bona fides this whole thing started. He may not be legally responsible, but he's the adult in the room who first bought the hype, and he HAD TO have known that the whole damn thing was vaporware. "Fake it til you make it" is not okay in medicine.

Re:Its About Time

[quantaman]

Many here (and elsewhere, in the Real World) noted the bizarre disconnect between the treatment of Martin Shkreli (who deserved what he got, and more) and Elizabeth Holmes who was running a far vaster scheme to defraud but mysteriously seemed to escape any real personal consequences.

I'm not sure that's true. Investigations move slowly, Shkreli wasn't charged for hiking the price on the drug, he was charged for financial crimes several years earlier. Based on when the malfeasance was discovered I think the investigation into Holmes actually moved faster.

As for the reputation, Holmes seems to have been an unusually successful con-artist. Shkreli actually seemed to delight in trolling the public.

Re:Its About Time

[hey!]

I'm not sure what the complaint here is. Holmes was indicted after a two year-long investigation of Theranos; it so happens the first hard information showing Theranos was fraudulent came out a little more than two years ago, so the investigation started pretty much as soon as it came to the attention of the prosecutor's office.

Shkreli's company MSMB Capital Management was revealed to be Ponzi scheme in 2011, when it couldn't cover a naked short sale it fraudulently claimed it could, and it took four years to indict him for that, and it was at least two years before the US Atty even opened an investigation. During that time Shkreli started a second Ponzi scheme hoping to pay off the first, and that collapsed too.

The only reason justice for Shkreli seemed swift was that he was in the public eye just before the indictment hammer fell for his dick-ish pharma moves, but that's not what they got him on. Holmes was indicted roughly twice as fast as Shkreli.