[Nomentatus]

If you want completeness, there may be another possibility: we know that venture capitalists (who spend other people's money, for the most part) have used their positions to improve their sex lives (#metoo) contrary to the interests of their investors. It's just assumed none of them have ever actually handed over millions of other people's money to hairbrained projects in order to accomplish this. I very much hope that's so. But this is a risk of having too many male (or worse, bro) VC executives.

[subpixel]

Well, that line of thinking opens up a whole other angle of speculation (and of course that's all it is, so I won't detail it) regarding how events may have unfolded in this debacle.

[headmelted]

If the implication in this is that in some way investment was made in exchange for anything "else" from Elizabeth Holmes, then I have to say that I haven't seen any reason to think that and it's offensive to suggest that any kind of sex-for-investment scenario was happening without any basis for believing that.

I may have completely misunderstood what was being suggested here though..

[Nomentatus]

Not sure what you mean by "won't detail". Do you mean "won't include in the list"? Since you've tried to list all the possible speculative causes of this sort of debacle, without committing to any of them... it would surely be odd to omit one because, like the others, it's speculation. But I'm not sure what else you could mean, since no elaboration of the concept is required.

Granted, I've raised an especially unpleasant possibility (as no more than that), especially for consideration going forward; but fraud from other causes is also unpleasant and has to be considered despite being unpleasant and, according to the article, not necessarily an act of commission. To quote: "But the fact that Theranos was a gigantic fraud doesn't quite mean that it committed fraud." You've considered it, nonetheless, and I think that's reasonable - as speculation.