The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley | March 18, 2019 - HBO

[NorthStar]

Elizabeth Holmes was 'delusional? You betcha she was, and probably still is.
There are few documentaries about her and her company, plus this upcoming one on HBO, plus a film starring Jennifer Lawrence in the role of Holmes.

"Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is the founder and former CEO of Theranos, a now-defunct company known for its false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests that used very small amounts of blood. In 2015, Forbes named Holmes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in America on the basis of a $9 billion valuation of Theranos. By the next year, following revelations of potential fraud, Forbes revised her net worth to zero dollars, and Fortune named Holmes one of the "World's Most Disappointing Leaders".

I'm looking forward to this new documentary next week, plus the eventual film with Jennifer playing Elizabeth. It sounds like the perfect diet movie recipe. And I hope it's better than 'Vice'.

I know that everyone knows about Theranos, still it is fascinating the story of all the people behind who supported Elizabeth Holmes, falling from grace to disgrace.

 

[NorthStar]

• https://www.vulture.com/amp/2019/03/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-hbo-documentary-gifs.html

Anyone had the courage to watch it?

I wonder if she get paid for this. Lol

 

[NorthStar]

Hmmm, the subject is a good one. I'm going to plunge in it, and share everything I find out and not. It's worth it in my reality book, worth exploring. It's on my queue to view real soon.

So many films and documentaries so little time.
But this one I won't skip it, just too close for comfort.

 

[astrotoy]

The Book "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou is a great read. He is the Wall Street Journal reporter who unearthed the scandal. His first articles came out in 2015, but Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes continued with their mammoth scam (including with the financial support of some big time investors including the owner of the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch) for another year. Holmes put a lot of pressure on Murdoch to kill the story, but to his credit he did not interfere, even though he was the biggest investor, putting $125 million in the firm.

Larry

 

[NorthStar]

I've heard about the book, about the two documentaries, read several articles...

Right now Elizabeth Holmes is living in San Francisco with a boyfriend in a luxurious apartment.
She has a good team of lawyers, and this case could last quite a while.

Last night I watched that HBO documentary. It's just a start with everything else I've read from solid sources.

This subject is of great interest to me right now because it represents the desillusionary world we live in every single day in the news. A lots of stuff is happening across the globe and on this continent...America, but I picked Elizabeth Holmes from Silicon Valey to go into the depths, the dots, the connections with investors, entrepreneurs, deceivers, con artists with high fashion style, deep voices, turtle necks à la Steve Jobs, alliances with the riches, copycats, scammers, and all the people who supported her without knowing "dik" in what they were investing, conned by a con young woman.

I tell you this; she's something else, and best to stay away from her. Your life will be much better without being in her circle of lies and deceptions. Methinks she is extremely frustrated emotionally and needs to exploit the powerful people to satisfy a very dangerous ego that is best to be within four small concrete walls of a jail cell.

It's way too early to predict how many years she will spend behind bars; I'd say ten but I could be completely wrong if she pleads insanity sometimes in 2020-21.

For someone worths less than zero and to have screwed up many patients, she's living the high life right now...luxury. And where she gets the money to afford a top team of attorneys just beats me, but this is America and anything is possible, even the impossible.

Larry, that's good you know this all affair for a while, reading the good book.
This documentary might supply you with additional info.

• https://mashable.com/article/theran...tails-the-inventor-hbo-left-out/#PxFbU6iFmsqK

She's not making the news much right now, unless you go there directly, then she's making the news big time, including this new documentary from last Monday.
No right now we are in Boeing news, New Zealand news, Jackson news, Venezuela news, Saudi Arabia news, North and South Korea news, China news, Russia news, Muller news, the Duke of Ducks news, Marvel news, ...all that jazz; but it is Elizabeth Holmes and the company she invented...Theranos, plus all the suckers who got sucked by her that is my main interest of the present moment.

I want to go real deep here and read what others have to say.
We love music and we love our sound systems and we love when we play, and we also love how the technological scams work and who are behind them and what drives them, from deeply damaged neurons to living in a high fantasy world. There is some twisted psychology @ play here, deep belief from a top scam artist. She is a top manipulator of all classes of our society, and with no direction home other than fame, power, greed, luxury high style living.

It is quite amazing all the gullible idiots and stupid people and rich powerful people, investors who supported her. They had no clue, zero knowledge on how to research the people and their companies. All they all want is make their money growing in believing in fake air from a scam artist. You really have to be ignorant and totally stupid to follow her footprints. ...Murdoch, Schultz, Kissinger, Mattis, Clinton, ...and all the rest who got wacked by her, and wanted to wack money from her. It's a disease of people without a single morality and without intelligent search in investment. They are all responsible for the demise of all the patients, themselves included...patients of a psychiatric society in search for their own cure that doesn't exist.

But it's the patients who are the biggest losers, for being wrongly diagnosed.
That's not very nice, it's actually abominable, diabolical, and she and her investors are all responsible to be so stupid and idiots. They just don't care and never blame themselves but then others. Elizabeth Holmes she's nothing, she's just a clown, and everyone who invested in her.

The young smart kids knew, but they were fearing for their jobs too long. The irreparable damage is done, who truly cares about Elizabeth Holmes? Nobody, that's who...this is America great again.

Larry, you've read the book; what surprised you the most?
And, are you going to watch this new documentary?

...The Dropout ...

 

[NorthStar]

I won't be shy in giving my opinion about everything surrounding Elizabeth Holmes circle of friends and on her particularly. I'm sure you saw that already. That's what good smart informative documentaries do to me. It makes me searching much much more.

I've read those two articles already; they are not part of the actualities, so feel free to read them or not, it's not everyone who have the same interest @ the same time in life.

• https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a26810723/elizabeth-holmes-now/

• https://www.eonline.com/ca/news/102...th-holmes-and-the-theranos-team-are-up-to-now

Yes there are many things which captivate our interest; music, films, families, climate change, space science, cancer research, education, social studies, global communication, nature, wildlife, human resources, the pursuit of the impossible audio dream, how to get there, the journey and all. This thread is not about pictures without words, it's about HBO new doc on Elizabeth Holmes the fake inventor after blood for money.

She definitely copied Steve Job's turtleneck style, and changed her voice to make it bigger than real life. She would have been good as an actress in Hollywood. She was, still is truly delusional. She has zero life, no morals no sense of reality no nothing good on this planet for others to appreciate real benefits for humanity and community and society...less than zero.

 

[NorthStar]

I completely forgot to rate the documentary; is it important?
Yes it is because some folks are into mathematics.

Overall (from my own perspective and knowledge and research interest): 78

It's a very good recommendation of course. But go further, like Larry did...read the book and search some more because she represents America's Silicon Valley, one of the rotten apples.
She's a big zero and so all the people who bought her Mickey mouse bullcrap.
People ought to know, and let see how justice deals with scammers like her.
She hurt a lot of people with her big voice and black turtleneck...looking like the black widow without her big blue eyes blinking. Me I think she should be doing community work (helping the poor, do their laundry, recycling their garbage, ...) for the next forty years...six days a week, without any vacation and living in the same conditions as the poor. Put her @ good work for the people who need it the most. If I was in charge of making the laws and applying them from a superior court judge that's what she would get and all the people who knew and said nothing and all the people idiots enough to not do their diligent investigation. Kill the disease of greed right @ the head...the entrepreneurs like her and all her investors and workers who knew it from a long time ago. They are all accomplices of a despicable crime, a big fraud, scam, bunch of lies from a clown and her entire circus. Nobody wants to take responsibility and call the shots for what they are, nobody because they always blame someone else for their own faults.
_____

Extra: Upcoming film ...
• https://people.com/movies/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-jennifer-lawrence-movie/

The book:

 

[astrotoy]

My wife is a professor emeritus at UCSF (University of California San Francisco), and was director of the blood bank there until she retired in 2010. One of her colleagues was Tim Hamill, the head of the clinical labs at UCSF where all the blood drawn from patients is tested. So he knows a lot about testing blood. Being in the Bay Area, he was approached by Holmes and Theranos about their portable desk top printer sized "wonder machine" named Edison, which supposedly was going to revolutionize the blood testing industry. We had lunch with Tim shortly after he retired, when the Theranos scandel was just breaking in late 2015 or maybe early 2016. He told us that they made their pitch to them and he asked a few questions, including getting an Edison machine to test to compare the results of the machine to the standard tests that UCSF does routinely with the venous blood draws. He said they never came back with the sample machine. The book's author John Carreyrou had interviewed him in 2015 asking about the Theranos testing procedures, taking a drop of blood from a needle stick in the finger and diluting the sample to run multiple tests. He reported Tim's comments in the book (p.230-1).

"TIm (Vice-Chair of the Department of Lab Medicine UCSF) confirmed to me that both practices were highly questionable. He also explained the pitfalls of using blood pricked from a finger. Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate. 'I'd be less surprised if they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-seveth century than if they told us they cracked that nut,' he said."

Last summer we were at a reunion of retired Lab Medicine faculty and Tim told us about the book, which we ordered immediately.

Larry

 

[NorthStar]

Good read Larry. In the documentary that machine is well exposed, inside, and it's a total mess.
We have commentaries from young people who know about that machine, and one of its builder.

Also, someone had his blood tested by that so-called machine, and the results came roughly an hour later, but no one was with the machine, of course not because the blood was tested in another room, by lab scientists, and not inside the machine. It was all lies.

So after reading your above post I am not surprised that no machine was offered to anyone because it was a total fiasco that machine. I highly recommend that you and your wife watch the documentary as it adds something new that the book didn't.

It is for this reason that I'm not only blaming Elizabeth Holmes (a lunatic without reason), but also all the rich people of high status who invested in her and her crazy ideas and lies. They got duped very good, and it's their fault, their stupid grandiose fault. When you invest in a company you do methodic research with concrete proofs, you visit the company, you ask questions to the bosses and employees, not just some "gomme baloune" from Mickey mouse. ...Chewing gum.

She was also told that her idea wouldn't work, very clearly few times.
But Holmes was too stubborn for listening to the experts and contacting more experts as it was recommended to her.

One of the real scientists on blood, I forgot his name, with scientific discoveries and inventions under his name, committed suicide. Elizabeth Holmes put her name instead of his in one of his inventions. I don't know if you read it in the book but it's well defined in the documentary. She's a froot loop, a thief, grand liar, dangerous scammer with all fake appearance à la Steve Jobs (turtleneck), a clown artist, and people just got plummed by her...taken for a high ride to zero nowhere. She's a wannabe without morals and human values, a destroyer with a bunch of idiots invested in her.

Ten billions is no small change.
And I'm amazed that she is living in a luxurious apartment in San Francisco.
She should be in jail with the other slums and scums and scams of our society.
And a lot of other people with her too ...

I bet she didn't expect to be exposed eventually. It wasn't a healthy place to work near the end...700 employees. Paranoia was in the air and everyone was living in fear to talk to anyone.
She was a control freak and I bet there is no cure for her.

Small world; your wife's job and your friends. I know it must strike a chord much closer than I. Still, even if my jobs were far away from Silicon Valley and anything to do with blood, I put all my interest in this right now. It's the way I am, from one venture to the next.

I'm glad you are replying here from your interest. ...Close interest too.
It's not the type of subject having an interest in many people from my circle of friends and family. People tend to be interested in the things that touch their own personal lives. I understand that 100%. The thing is this; it affects everyone in one way or another. It's like a disease with a chain reaction effect, a bunch of dominoes hitting each other in a full bath of blood and dirty money.

The dropout and the art of scam.

Others are under other scandals and schemes of shame and deception.
Real smart people are robbed of their careers by con artists. Perhaps in another thread ...
Elizabeth Holmes is a special case of her own, the master of deception.
And she thinks that she didn't do anything wrong!
Her vision of Silicon Valley and the human race in America must be very very foggy ...

I found it unbelievable the grand disbalance, dysfunctional course of action from people like her.
How is it possible to have those businesses going for so long.
Where is this world coming to. ...Bad blood, very.

 

[astrotoy]

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/nig...y-elizabeth-holmes-theranos/story?id=60365362

Here is a six part podcast from ABC on Holmes and Theranos. Very nicely done. Around 45 minutes for each podcast.

We don't have HBO, but the movie sounds intriguing.

Larry

 

[BlueFox]

There is good money to be made in high-tech, so it will naturally attract scammers. Nothing new here, just do your homework.

 

[astrotoy]

I think the scariest part of the Theranos scandal was not the Silicon Valley part, but that they were giving bad information to people about their health conditions. Worst were all the false negatives, where they were doing tests for diseases from diabetes to heart problems to cancer and doctors would rely on the false negatives to not treat a patient. Second worse were false positives, which meant that doctors would treat a condition that did not exist. For false positives, if the patient were very lucky, sometimes a doctor would order a second test to confirm the result at a different lab. But most of the time that doesn't happen. Remember, these Theranos testing centers were being rolled out at Walgreens, the biggest drug store chain in the country. Fortunately they were caught before it was nationwide, to over 8000 Walgreen pharmacies, and only 41 had Theranos labs in their stores. Still over 10,000 lab results had to be withdrawn, well after the patients and doctors had acted upon them.

Larry

 

[NorthStar]

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/nig...y-elizabeth-holmes-theranos/story?id=60365362

Here is a six part podcast from ABC on Holmes and Theranos. Very nicely done. Around 45 minutes for each podcast.

We don't have HBO, but the movie sounds intriguing.

Larry

Good stuff Larry; I'm halfway done.

* Yes Bud, there's money to be made in high tech. And where there's money comes all the rest.
Elizabeth Holmes is one heck of a trappeur (putting traps in the healthcare system for the idiot investors). Give the dog a bone, give Elizabeth a bone too...a black suitcase full of cash...$100,000 bills specially made for her. She deserves it, she worked hard for it. ...And her boyfriend too...the one with the Porsche and the Lamborghini, Sunny Balwani.

Former Theranos COO Ramesh Balwani leaves the Robert F. Peckham U.S. Federal Court on January 14, 2019 in San Jose, California.

• https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-former-president-sunny-balwani-role-in-the-company-2018-5

That Balwani guy is a bad sunnabaggun.

"In HBO's "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley," director Alex Gibney got more than 100 hours of leaked footage from Theranos, which included some of Balwani's company-wide motivational speeches, company parties, and Holmes and Balwani dancing to "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer.

"The footage even captured one of Balwani's infamous company activities: leading chants of "f--- you" to people and companies he perceived as enemies."

"While Holmes served as the figurehead, Balwani stayed behind the scenes, "terrorizing everyone," Carreyrou said.

For example, Balwani took it upon himself to keep track of how long employees were working. In one encounter, Balwani brought up security footage that showed a software engineer only working an eight-hour day. He told the employee, "I'm going to fix you." The engineer promptly resigned and left the building, even as Balwani sent a security officer to try and stop him. Balwani then called the police on the employee.

"A lot of my ex-employee sources, who for the first year was speaking to me on the background, were traumatized by what they experienced at Theranos," Carreyrou said. "It was like a mind-warping sort of experience."

 

[NorthStar]

I think the scariest part of the Theranos scandal was not the Silicon Valley part, but that they were giving bad information to people about their health conditions. Worst were all the false negatives, where they were doing tests for diseases from diabetes to heart problems to cancer and doctors would rely on the false negatives to not treat a patient. Second worse were false positives, which meant that doctors would treat a condition that did not exist. For false positives, if the patient were very lucky, sometimes a doctor would order a second test to confirm the result at a different lab. But most of the time that doesn't happen. Remember, these Theranos testing centers were being rolled out at Walgreens, the biggest drug store chain in the country. Fortunately they were caught before it was nationwide, to over 8000 Walgreen pharmacies, and only 41 had Theranos labs in their stores. Still over 10,000 lab results had to be withdrawn, well after the patients and doctors had acted upon them.

Larry

There are many flaws in many sectors of hi-tech in Silicon Valley, but what you've just said above Larry is that when it comes to people's health you simply cannot let this go under the table.
That's the main essence. But then, drugs and tobacco companies, oil and gas companies, ...they are screwing up people's health as well.

Telecommunications? 5G with super high audio frequencies that the human body is not anti-cancer to.

If money and jobs are more important than human health and peace and freedom of expression, the barbares and dictators and control freaks are given free reign to rule the planet and kill as many people as they please to. People like Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani and "Liz" Holmes are very very bad apples.

The weirdest thing is that they believe they did nothing wrong and it was all within the laws of the land. Morals and human values just forget it, those people are not living on the same planet as normal citizens. Greed is their morality number one, the rest has nothing to do with human health.

Are they going to go to jail? For what, for following all the laws? No judge following the books of laws is going to incarcerate them, after all this is the world we live in ... money.

Yes I'm a little sarcastic here @ the end, it's because I find it so unbelievable that they are walking free right now. They are the biggest treat to our health. Their bail should have been set @ $500 million, not @ peanuts joke $500,000 ... this is all ridiculously wrong. What's going on with people in this world...it is so dysfunctional Theranos and those two clown leaders. Sunny guy and Liz gal are not from our planet, they are extremely arrogant, dangerous, power trip big ego, killing people in need of real care by giving wrong blood test results.

How hard is it to see, what one needs to stop this insanity.
Methinks we need better lawmakers to protect people's health.
Perhaps in one thousand more years, @ the precipice of human extinction?
Bad blood, very very very bad.

 

[NorthStar]

 

[astrotoy]

Thanks, great parody. Larry

 

[NorthStar]

The entire Theranos affair is "mucho más profundo". It goes way beyond all the incredible amount of files on fully loaded hard drives. There is enough material here to fill a library.

And it goes way beyond Elizabeth Holmes (she should be in jail right now with Sunny); it also involves all the investors, the toxic atmosphere in the research lab building with all the employees who were in the know. For money, for a job, the majority of the human race shut their mouth and go on as if life was just normal. It happens everywhere in the world not just in Silicon Valley.

I've watched several YouTube short documentaries, read more articles to get a better hang of this all situation. It's a human chain reaction, mainly money/job/status/greed/control/deception driven, and more. Brief, it's very "bad blood", ...it's a social human dilemma.
The values are M O N E Y. The more money the closer to heavens we get; of course it's a way of saying that for a lot of people the paradise on Earth is made of diamonds and gold.

But Theranos is not the only company with people in it and affiliated with it that lives from those same values. The blue dot of the galaxy we all live on (7.65 billion) is in gravitational force attracted in several ways to that aspiration. It's a distinction of man's evolution, the law of the jungle for survival with minimum brain activity. Ok, I won't write a book on human psychology and philosophy even if I have a very strong desire to do so. First I would need to go back to school and get few PhDs and Masters in those "sectors". And besides life's too short plus there is just too much music to explore and discover. ...Films too. And, family and travel.

The book 'Bad Blood' is next to read. The author seems to be well "grounded".

The documentary (HBO) is only a short glimpse. But that's the point; it still arouses one's interest to research and discover much more.

Yes it goes well beyond just Elizabeth Holmes, and her family and Theranos and her Dad and her class status, all that social class pizzazz ... it's the entire association of all the social elites with one goal in mind; helping the world the way they know best..."equalization" ... nobody is perfect and it's ok. Humans are not perfect and they make mistakes; it's ok to forgive and forget.
Is it?

• https://newrepublic.com/article/153419/theranos-documentary-misses

I subscribe to my life's interests; music, nature, films, our planet and the human race across the seven seas. I like informative documentaries about everything, including Theranos.

 

[NorthStar]

Thanks, great parody. Larry

Larry, you are in my book. Meaning you are part of some of the conversations I have occasionally with family members and friends. ...In high respect. Space is another fascinating subject.

 

[NorthStar]

When we are surfing on our computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, the browsers we use they collect the data and they provide more data and the newest trends on the latest news from the subjects of interest.

It's like going to the library and getting information from a book or two with references to other books and articles throughout and @ the end of the book(s).

When I refresh my devices and start a new page/tab, it provides me more content on the subjects I was surfing and reading earlier...a day, a week ago. It's like the computer gets to know you and your habits.

So, for The Inventor: Out For blood...Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes I get references to articles, videos, interviews, etc. each time I refresh my homepage on any of my devices.
Our computers are like friends who know us best and contribute to expand our knowledge by providing more material on the subjects of our interests.

I've watched several video interviews, read several articles from Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Montréal, ...the best newspapers and writers of North America (Forbes, Fortune, Globe & Mail, Post, ...) on Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes and close associate "Sunny" and her family and where they are @ now today.

This short 10-min video interview with the author of Bad Blood is one of the better one:

Today Elizabeth Holmes is engaged with a 27-year old and happy and living in San Francisco.
You can Google it (Edge it, Safari it, Firefox it, ...) if interested further, with pictures.
She is living nicely in a luxury apartment and the boyfriend is nicely comfy himself financially; it runs in the family, just like with Elizabeth.
• https://amp.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-founder-engaged-relationship-2019-3

Watch that interview above; it raises serious questions about the many very "intelligent" investors, and also the way it was approved and went to market.
Big mistakes were made here but is it really that surprising?
If your family is rich, well known, highly respected, high status, you have the support from very smart people, you are very talented @ pitching, your name spells gold and diamonds and luxury homes, you dress up like Steve Jobs, act like him, talk smoothly with your lowest octave, what possibly can go wrong even when defrauding all your investors and public?
And that "Sunny" boyfriend she had in the past he's no angel that guy either. That was a lethal combination because he helped the lies to keep growing bigger and bigger with an attitude of bad bad bad mobsters...like Bonnie & Clyde? Yeah, that's it, the Bonnie and Clyde of Silicon Valley with very bad blood. ...And everything kept very secret under the radar.

What else is new?

 

[NorthStar]

Couple days ago I saw that short video showing Elizabeth and her engaged boyfriend.
She seems quite happy to be out of the spotlight. He seems to be a nice decent normal guy too.
They both look happy, strolling together around the neighborhood and @ the park.
• https://www.insideedition.com/accus...-her-days-hotel-heir-fiance-and-dog-51876?amp

What a contrast from black to white, and no more turtleneck.
Baseball hat now, the normal life, plus barbecues. She blend in nicely.

I think her ex-boyfriend is the one who was the bad influence?
He played her naivety? ...That Sunny guy, the "enforcer" who watched videos to make sure everyone was working full time and extra. ...Like an Egyptian emperor ruling above from the top of his pyramid. He's an interesting character too, very.
• https://www.yourtango.com/201932316...ranos-president-elizabeth-holmes-ex-boyfriend