Seems excessive to me. I don't really care about people conning rich people into parting with their money, especially when they don't bother to do basic due diligence before hand.
IMO the reason Holmes deserves to be locked up for a long time is not just because of the fraud she committed, but the way she tried to use her power and her powerful friends to destroy people whose only crime was telling the truth.
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
A typical median families income was approx. $70k in 2021. That covers multiple people, and in general across the US is enough to pay for housing, schooling, medical care, etc.
A lifetime of that (inflation adjusted) is usually enough for someone to retire somewhere.
If you take the 48 years from 18 to social security retirement age of 66, that would make a median lifetimes earnings $3,360,000 in 2021 dollars.
Holmes got nearly $1bln from investors in the Theranos mess, which is 297 lifetimes worth of median earnings, which considering that directly maps to someone (or multiple someones) working hard for that time, can be consider ‘life’s works’.
She was convicted of fraud on at least $140 million of wire transfers out of that, or ‘only’ 41 life’s works.
While 11 years is a long time, the destruction of value done is nothing to scoff at.
With decent leadership, 300 people working for their entire lives could accomplish a lot of great things.
Of course, it could also be blown on crypto scams and lambos. It’s not a perfect comparison.
However, there's a consideration - if I somehow steal $1m from Elon, it materially doesn't affect him that much at all. But if I steal $5k from a McDonald's employee, it could ruin them.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.” -Anatole France
She didn't incinerate the money, she spent it, it went somewhere else. It went to workers and other companies.
Now maybe that money could have been spent to commission 300 workers to make great things. Maybe it would have gone to pump up the S&P 500 or some shitcoin.
The problem is that she used false pretexts to get and spend the money.
The ‘life’s work’ metric doesn’t say it’s wasted - it ends up folks pockets, of course, eventually. And some of that will of course also go into things which are more than ‘just’ living.
It’s what it was directed to accomplish, and if that activity produced something of equivalent value (or more) on it’s journey to that state, or dissipated into heat and noise.
Near as I can tell, Theranos was at least 99% heat and noise.
Eh, you would have to prove that the capital would have been allocated to something more useful in the absence of Theranos to prove that that hurts anyone. Most of her investors were not in the medical field, which is part of the reason they never realized she was selling snake oil.
> Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
I agree with this in theory but I think fines and a ban from working in certain industries or founding companies is probably enough, not a decade in prison.
If it’s not possible to catch these scams in advance, what other chilling effect is going to reduce the quantity of others taking billions of dollars while lying through their teeth?
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
