[Boritanian]

She effectively stole millions. That's multiple lifetimes worth of work for a lot of people.

If you assume average salary of 100k per year per person with 1/4th of time work per year. that's effectively 400k per year per person. He stole a hundred million which would be 250 years.

[dagw]

She effectively stole millions.

From people who could easily afford to lose it and who should have known better. None of the people she defrauded have a materially worse quality of life than they did before.

Her biggest crime was making rich people look stupid, and they REALLY don't like that.

[dayvid]

In the book Bad Blood, people wanted to come out to expose Theranos and she had the most expensive law firm in CA basically threaden to sue people into oblivion. The person who spoke to the WSJ journalist who broke the story and put his name on the record did so because his dad mortgaged their house to deal with legal implications. Before that there were patients, doctors, employees etc. bullied by the company into submission.

[theglocksaint]

Really? What about the literal stalking by her legal team? Two people directly involved in the company were suicidal due to the environment she created, one of whom did end up committing suicide.

[dagw]

Apparently not a serious crime it would seem, since no prosecutor seems to care. It is very clear that in the current court system defrauding rich people is a much worse crime that 'accidentally' killing a few poor people. Had she gotten drunk and killed someone with her car, she would be looking at a much lighter sentence.

[jklinger410]

This is the inverse of implying the people Kyle Rittenhouse deserved to die because of their criminal history.

It does not matter at all that they could afford to lose it. Her biggest crime was the one she just got convicted of, being a fraud and lying for profit.

One side of this conversation is unnecessarily harsh, I get that, but the other side of this conversation is playing mental gymnastics to try and downplay what she did. Both are wrong.

[selfhoster11]

> From people who could easily afford to lose it and who should have known better.

Who in turn gained their money from trickle-up economics targeting the working and middle classes, in all likelihood.

[spaniard89277]

Money that could have gone elsewhere where there wasn't fraud.

I don't get this apologetic comment.

[dagw]

I don't get this apologetic comment.

The crime she was convicted of isn't a crime you should spend effectively the rest of your life in jail for. It's as simple as that.

[CRConrad]

> The crime she was convicted of isn't a crime you should spend effectively the rest of your life in jail for. It's as simple as that.

Not if you're a young(-ish) and relatively good-looking female billionaire CEO, at least.

Apparently, judging from the fact that I haven't seen all you people spouting this line on the barricades fighting for more lenient sentences for ordinary lowlife ugly middle-aged male fraudsters.

That's how simple it is.

[flexie]

If it matters how rich the investors she defrauded actually are, perhaps she should get just a few months in jail:

"Notably, Theranos’ investors weren’t the usual-suspect venture capital firms. Rather, her funding came from individuals like former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Walton family, among other wealthy elites. Some evidence showed that these investors were willing to give Theranos money even when Holmes evaded their more probing questions."

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/03/elizabeth-holmes-verdict-g...

[rswail]

That's why she's being prosecuted so heavily, she screwed with the wrong people.

[JshWright]

> her funding came from individuals like former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Walton family, among other wealthy elites.

And there we have the crux of why she was prosecuted...

You're much better off screwing average people, then it's just "capitalism".