Sadly, probably this:
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Quoting Sigmund Freud: Anatomy is destiny.
At least those WERE successful businesses as one point. One could be forgiven for thinking that with the right management they might be again. Theranos was never anything more than wishful thinking, greed, and a cult of personality wrapped up in a black turtleneck. Without crazy-eyes to woo investors what is there other than liability for past frauds?
edited to ad: Of course “the right management” is rarely a bunch of asset stripping, debt hiding, fraud-y hedgies.
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Well, I suppose there’s a certain… charm… to hanging one’s hat on single/too few data points. That said…
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I guess that’s what is keeping the lights on at Sears, but one would think that after 13 years, they’d eventually give up on Lampert’s “Now I really mean it, this time!” routine.
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SERIOUS REQUEST: can we unpin this from the top of BB. I find her face seriously disconcerting. I am going to need a therapy session each time I visit BB’s homepage so long as this photo is prominent.
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Already happened, kinda sorta.
Published July 2015:
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Well if we stole “millions of dollars”, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t spend a day in jail, or at least it’s my understanding that jail is for poor people.
On a serious note, I’m not entirely sure if anyone was actually physically or medically harmed by Theranos. From my understanding the system never worked, and all their results were actually done by traditional equipment. However, the FDA did shut down their lab due to serious safety concerns.
But a bunch of rich folks lost their money because the believes some lies and hype around a device that apparently could never work due to physics. And it’s not like that money was just lost or pocketed. It went to salaries and and procurement. Consider it wealth redistribution, and we need more of that.
I post a light hearted TMI about some random fraudster on the interwebs, and all of a sudden I’m Harvey freakin’ Weinstein 
While I appreciate the sarcasm, stealing through physical means or through fraud is the same crime. Theft is not “wealth redistribution”. What is really bothersome to me is the guy who steals $100 and goes to jail for 10 years, while people who steal millions get no or minor punishment.
It’s a bit off-topic, but your post reminded me of what Warren Buffet said about Trump, some years ago: “When you owe $100, they come take the TV set. When you owe $1 billion, they say, ‘Hang in there, Donald’.”
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"The story of 54-year-old Roy Brown, a homeless man who couldn’t afford to pay basic food and shelter expenses, is heartbreakingly cruel: A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
The day after this story appeared, prosecutors celebrated the fact that they were able to get a 40-month prison sentence for investment tycoon Paul R. Allen, who defrauded lenders of more than $3 billion." *
*https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/homeless-man-versus-corporate-thif/
I read this a few years ago and it still stays with me.
TANJ** (bonus points if you get this one without looking it up. From one of my favorite authors)
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It is indeed a sad story. The injustice is against Roy Brown, though. Apparently, Paul Allen testified against the main criminal, Lee Farkas, who got 30 years, twice as many as Brown. It sounds like Brown deserved a lighter sentence.
JFC. 
When I was fresh out of high school, I used to work as a filing clerk at the Supreme Court of NSW. The job was to deliver the court files to the judges for whatever cases they were hearing that day.
It was a braindead monkey job; once you’d been at it for a while, you could easily get your week’s work done in two or three days. But if you were seen overtly hanging around doing nothing you’d get in trouble, so I used to kill time in the basement reading old court transcripts.
Court cases usually don’t go in a simple linear fashion from trial to judgement. Instead, a judge will hear a bunch of cases, think about them for a while, then have a “judgement day” when they hand down their decisions on all of their pending cases.
I remember reading a pair of judgements, handed down by the same judge on the same day. The first was for a bloke who’d been convicted of a string of sex offences against 7-12 year old girls.
The judgement went on at great length about how the offender was a respected figure in the community, a successful stockbroker who spent his spare time volunteering at the local childcare centre. The judge argued that the damage to his reputation was almost sufficient punishment in itself. In the end, he sentenced him to 6 months minimum, 18 months maximum, with 4 months already served on remand.
The other case that he dealt with was a guy convicted of importing hashish. He got 22 years.
Same judge, same day. TANJ.
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DING, DING, DING !
Give that man ten bonus internet points !!
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