Elizabeth Holmes Totally Fooled Betsy DeVos and Pumped Her Family For Millions, Says Witness

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: Daily Beast

The family of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos invested nearly $100 million in Theranos after a marathon meeting with the biotech startup’s founder Elizabeth Holmes, a director of the billionaire’s family office testified on Tuesday.

Lisa Peterson, who manages private equity investments for the DeVos clan’s RDV Corporation, told jurors at Holmes’ California wire fraud trial that she and members of the Michigan-based dynasty flew to Silicon Valley in 2014 to meet Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the company’s former president and Holmes’ ex-boyfriend.

Peterson testified that Holmes was “hand picking” uber-wealthy families to invest in the Palo Alto company, which claimed its portable blood-testing devices could screen for scores of diseases with just the prick of a patient’s finger. (But, according to federal prosecutors, Holmes and Balwani knew their technology didn’t work as advertised, even as they peddled it to consumers and high-powered investors.)

According to Peterson, Holmes told the DeVoses that she was courting a small number of private backers to avoid pressure from larger investment firms to take Theranos public. When prosecutor Robert Leach asked whether she believed Holmes was singling out the family office as a long-term investor, Peterson answered, “Very much so.”

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/elizabeth-holmes-totally-fooled-betsy-devos-and-pumped-her-family-for-millions-says-witness/ar-AAPZe0d?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=DELLDHP

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She could've bought another yacht with the money.

[IronLionZion]

1. RWers should all swindle each other as much as they can

and leave the rest of us out of it

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Americans gave at the office, that's how they amassed so much moolah

[TlalocW]

11. That's the thing - they do

Conservative B knows there's Conservative C further down the political spectrum and has a good understanding of what they think and more importantly what they fear so they come up with stuff to prey on them. So you get everything from $100 million scams to survivalist food buckets from Jim Bakker and all the COVID "cures."

He's Conservative B because there is undoubtedly an A further to his left but still conservative doing the same thing to him in one way or another.

It's a phenomenon I don't really see on the left.

TlalocW

[IronLionZion]

15. MAGAts are still giving TFG money for various schemes

not sure what they expect to get in return. Maybe they're expecting him to run for president again.

RW radio sells all sorts of snake oil and nonsense to gullible old people or whoever must be buying it. I'm thankful we don't have that on the left as far as I know.

[TlalocW]

22. I've thought long and hard about it

I mean, there's some snake oil on the left, but if the person selling it is also liberal, they actually believe in it as well and are not doing it maliciously or to purposely rip people off.

TlalocW

[Snarkoleptic]

2. It's amusing when swine consume swine!

I hope they both feel the lingering burn of legal jeopardy.

[Eliot Rosewater]

3. DeVos is lower than the scum at the bottom of the dumpster behind the greasy spoon

restaurant.

[TheRealNorth]

5. The only time rich people go to prison for theft is when they steal from richer people

[DENVERPOPS]

18. for proof just look at

Michael Wise, Infamous Denver S&L criminal, defrauded to the tune of 2 billion from taxpayers & got off scott free because he had Neal Bush on his board of directors. There wasn't even a trial, a Texas judge dismissed the case on pure bullshit......

He went to Aspen, conned 7 rich investors and ended up in Leavenworth.......

[NNadir]

6. As a scientist involved in bioanalysis, I find it hard to believe how this scam went on so long.

I was very relieved to read that during the trial, a Pfizer vetting expert declared the technology to be trash, and that Holmes subsequent fraud involved forging documents on a purloined Pfizer letterhead to claim that Pfizer was supportive of this nonsense.

Anyone, and anyone, who has worked with bioanalysis knows that handling a few microliters of blood to get a handle on even a single biomarker is a non-trivial event. It can be done, but only with very sophisticated equipment and highly advanced protocols and trained scientists.

Of course, DeVos is an intellectual lightweight, and a scammer as well, so there's some justice in this.

[William Seger]

9. What do you think of the Everlywell "food sensitivity" testing?

From what I've read, what it's detecting doesn't really indicate food sensitivity, which apparently doesn't prevent a lot of advertising these days.

[NNadir]

16. I'm not really familiar with it, but a brief look at some websites surrounding suggests that...

...it's highly dubious.

It's mentioned in this serious scientific paper: Unproven Diagnostic Tests for Adverse Reactions to Foods (Kelso, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice Volume 6, Issue 2, March–April 2018, Pages 362-365)

There doesn't seem to be any serious science behind it. Antibody tests typically are fairly sophisticated and require the use of sandwich assays involving some serious reagents, including, in most cases, biotinylated antibodies that are quite expensive and designed to avoid cross reactivities.

Frankly, it strikes me as snake oil garbage.

One sees these ads on TV - I've never seen one for Everlywell - and one wonders how they are allowed, since the claims are specious. One example of which I'm aware is the Neugenix Total T ads. If the product is real, it's probably dangerous, and if it's not dangerous, it's probably not real. I'm surprised the FDA hasn't hit them, but I don't know how the product is labeled and if legalese is used to prevent it from being banned or pulled from the market.

There is a law called "DSHEA" which to my mind should be repealed. It provides loopholes for this kind of stuff, but was pushed through by "nutraceutical" companies, which are often involved in baseless claims. These companies make huge amounts of money while providing no health benefit and often in fact, generating health risks.

Of course, any proposal to repeal DSHEA will generate a huge outcry about Pharmaceutical conspiracy theories. It never ceases to amaze me that people in my industry, who work really, really, really, really hard to improve and often save lives are so routinely hated.

[Rollo]

23. Yes, I also have a biomed research background...

And I was always a bit mystified by Holmes. She seemed to be in some sort of trance in the interviews I saw... long on effect and short on detail. I suppose she was the ultimate con artist, until she got caught.

[LymphocyteLover]

25. Agree-- the claims were laughable from the start for anyone familar with this sort of testing

it's not that the tests couldn't be done, but to be done in that little black box in the time frame they claimed and no human manipulation* was just absurd.

*IIRC

[RobinA]

33. Did You Read

the book about this swindle? It's a classic case of groupthink. On several levels. It's fascinating in a scary way.

[NNadir]

35. Yes. My son was asked to read it as part of is undergraduate research...

...project on microfluidic devices for HIV detection. It was a gift to the students in the research team which included chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and in my son's case materials science students, given by the commercial sponsor of their project.

He loaned me the book after he was done with it. It was fascinating. It speaks to the power that believing what one wants to believe and hearing what one wants to hear has over the human psyche.

Any competent bioanalytical scientist should be able to dismiss a claim like this almost a priori.

This is not to say that multiplex instruments do not exist, and that they can demonstrate sensitivity. They do exist. But this device was on inspection too absurd to be real.

I can imagine a real scientist joining a company like Theranos is thinking that there must be something "there," but being completely disillusioned within one or two weeks. This is apparently what happened with many of the employees. Of course if one has quit a job to take another with a fraudulent company, one's personal situation might not lead one to some difficulties, as apparently happened with Tyler Schultz.

If I recall correctly a scientist at the company committed suicide over despair at learning what the company was.

I hope they throw the book at her. She's a parasitic little brat, worthy of the Trunp family and circle perhaps, but should not be permitted to walk among decent human beings.

[dgauss]

7. A grifter grifting grifters. Sometimes the universe does seem in balance.

[ZonkerHarris]

8. I have a bridge in Brooklyn that would make an excellent investment vehicle for the Devos's

Call me, Betsy.

[Marcuse]

10. It's funny until you realize DeVos deducted losses on her tax returns and who picked up the slack.

She could have brought another yacht with the deductions.

[marble falls]

12. You can always can con a conman.

[comradebillyboy]

13. So she's not all bad then?

[Tanuki]

17. 👆 🤣🤣🤣

[peppertree]

14. They say it's no crime to steal from a thief,

And Mrs. Holmes - and her sidekick "Sunny" - may have just proven her right.

[obamanut2012]

26. Holmes isn't married and never has been

[East-A-Squared]

19. Scamway got scammed? Ha ha!

[jmowreader]

20. I suddenly respect Elizabeth Holmes a little

Help me out here. Did Elizabeth Holmes start this business as a scam, or did she go into it with good intentions and only turn it into a scam after they couldn’t get it to work?

[Rollo]

24. I figure it was always a scam...

... because it's not right to sell a product to investors without admitting it's never worked as advertised.

Of course she may simply have been highly delusional. There is that.

[IronLionZion]

28. A convincing sales person can delude themselves into believing it

in order to sound genuine.

Not Trump though. Everything he has ever said sounds fake to me.

[RobinA]

34. My Read

is that in the beginning Elizabeth Holmes was like a kid who coasts the family car out the driveway and thinks this driving thing isn't so hard. So she goes to the first stop sign on her street, turns right, and doesn't crash so now she is convinced she can drive. Eventually she realizes she's in over her head, but at that point she's on the Capital Beltway at rush hour with a trunk full of other people's cash, so she has to keep going so she doesn't crash. Meanwhile, a whole lot of men, rich men and famous men, have been cheering her on and they can't stop or they will look like they didn't know what they were talking about when they were cheering. Rich men, famous men, and lawyers get a lot of mileage out of soldiering on as if they are right when they know they are dead wrong. Eventually the whole mess gets too heavy and it blows its tires and crashes.

[NCjack]

27. MAGAt-on-MAGt fraud. OK with me.

[MissMillie]

29. Holmes avoided all sorts of disclosure by targeting private investors

Instead of taking Theranos public.

We watched the HBO documentary on this JUST yesterday.

Also, employees had to sign NDAs, which pretty much said if the employees blew the whistle on the fact that the technology didn't work, the employees were revealing "trade secrets."

It was painful to watch her lie over and over and over again.

Walgreens took a huge hit, opening testing clinics in their stores, only to have clinic staff draw blood the usual way for the usual tests.

I'm frankly surprised that Holmes hasn't been sued for medical malpractice.

[Johnny2X2X]

32. The Devos family started Amway

It's a pyramid scheme that the founders early on realized they could continue to run if they just hired a bunch of lawyers to constantly fight it in court. Good to see them get scammed, they are terrible fascists.

[sarcasmo]

36. Scamway family scammed, karma.

[Hassler]

37. Of course De Vos was fooled. Theranos is exactly like Amway