[recharged93]

Basically the gov't employee, son, and likely others we don't know about lost their jobs and even blacklisted.

I say 90% of VC back companies are blowing smoke to the endpoint investor, public and consumer. 100% of those companies have miracle products that scale forever and work... In 1 specific ise case: the demo booth. They oversell. I see 2 out of 10 startups bring a viable product to the global 2000 table.

Spacex: we can go to Mars, but haven't even launched a Mars rocket. Google: AI is here, and the product? Waymo, logs millions of miles, is just sunny conditions?

The common strategy: lie(aka promise), sell the future, hopefully you get the solution and hit time to market. Holmes was following the same playbook, BUT just gave up, and that's got her investors and comsumers furious. If she apologized, AND stuck with it, investors would still back her, and the public flac would have subsided....VCs were sold on her future.

On the opposite end, aside from real mistakes is a company like Apple: they sell the future and deliver.

[aptwebapps]

I don't think those examples match very well. Theranos really didn't have anything that worked. Spacex has rockets that work and satisfied customers. They aren't going to Mars yet, but most of their current satellite launch customers probably really don't care.

And of the various self-driving car efforts, Waymo seems one of the most careful, both in their engineering and PR. I don't recall them making any claims they can't back up, but I may have missed some.

[PeterisP]

Holmes was not following the same playbook, there's a big difference. What you say holds true for the early investors who may have been sold the future expectations, however, long after that Holmes recruited investors by stating that they have a "working Mars rocket" that's being used right now, when in fact it was smoke&mirrors using altered Siemens machines instead of the claimed Theranos technology.

The difference between saying "we expect to have X working within a year" and "we have had X for a year" is that if X doesn't work out, the second sentence is a crime of fraud. And Holmes was on the wrong end of this difference.

They're not prosecuting for the broken hopes of 2004-2006 investors (who were sold a future that didn't materialize, oh well), they're prosecuting for misleading the investors of, say, 2014 by lying about the achievements of their first 10 years.

[home_boi]

> Spacex: we can go to Mars, but haven't even launched a Mars rocket. Google: AI is here, and the product? Waymo, logs millions of miles, is just sunny conditions?

I don't think that is their literal message and goal. SpaceX's real mission is to innovate space travel which they've been capable of doing and have demonstrated with clear achievements.

SpaceX's revenue is in the billions and is very close to profitable. It most likely would be profitable if it wasn't constantly spending money to expand like Amazon in its early years.

[austenallred]

The difference is that SpaceX realizes the goal is aspirational, and isn’t signing people up for doomed rides to Mars right now.

[maxxxxx]

Exactly. If SpaceX started taking deposits for a Mars ride within the next two years there would be a problem.