Post: #526

Link?

I'm morbidly curious.

Post: #527

(06-28-2018 06:42 AM)Easy_C Wrote:  Link?

I'm morbidly curious.

There was even a thread on that - can't find it.

Post: #528

(06-28-2018 07:07 AM)Simeon_Strangelight Wrote:  

(06-28-2018 06:42 AM)Easy_C Wrote:  Link?

I'm morbidly curious.

There was even a thread on that - can't find it.

Written by Roosh!

Quote:New York City Spinsters Fly To San Francisco To Meet Rich Beta Nerds

http://www.returnofkings.com/37345/new-y...beta-nerds

Might have been a thread when auto-posted from the ROK article, but those are all deleted now.

Post: #529

Body language analysis - also interesting where the guy mentions that she slips out of the fake baritone in the 20 hours of interviews he reviewed. You can even hear it in one segment.

Post: #530

True to Fred Reed style, Fred Reed writes a hilarious review of the Carreyrou book "Bad Blood":

http://www.unz.com/freed/holmes-uncle-cl...c-con-job/

Post: #531

She ditches the heavy black eye-makeup and drops to the 5 she always was:

Post: #532

Ouch! Wow, what an ugly, gangly broad. Jennifer Lawrence will have to ugly herself up a bit to play her part in the upcoming movie.

I hope they show some of the in court scenes - would love to hear how she sounds in front of the judge and whether or not she tries to pull off the fake baritone voice she thought was so important.

It still seems like she's only now realizing there's no escaping the inquisition and - hopefully - consequences for her fraudster behavior. Burn, baby, burn.

Post: #533

(07-05-2018 04:04 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  True to Fred Reed style, Fred Reed writes a hilarious review of the Carreyrou book "Bad Blood":

http://www.unz.com/freed/holmes-uncle-cl...c-con-job/

I'll post it here since the article is indeed hilarious:

Quote:Holmes, Uncle Clunk, and and Epic Con Job
How American Business Apparently Sometimes Works
FRED REED • JUNE 26, 2018 • 1,200 WORDS • 143 COMMENTS • REPLY

Quote:OK, book report time. I have just finished reading Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. Good read, fascinating story. It is the saga of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, the miraculous blood-testing company of Silicon Valley. Holmes, formerly said to be worth $4.5 billion, ended up under criminal indictment for fraud as of 2015. I suppose many have heard vaguely of Theranos, as I had, but the actual story is astonishing.

Holmes, 19, drops out of Stanford to start a medical-instrumentation company. She is very smart, very driven, very self-confident, very glib, very cold-blooded, very manipulative, very willing to take risks, very pretty, and very ruthless. Everything about her is very. If the foregoing resembles the clinical description of a psychopath, there is a reason.

She also knows almost nothing of the sciences, and nothing at all of electronic or mechanical engineering, or of medical instrumentation. That is, she has no qualifications in the field. She is just very–that word again–smart and pretty and talks a swell show. And yet…ye gods and little catfishes, what she managed to do.

Her goal was to invent a medical blood-analyzer that could do a large number of tests on a single drop of blood from a pricked finger. It was a bright idea. If it had worked, it would have been a (very) big deal. This of course is also true of anti-gravity space shps and perpetual motion machines. Making it work required nothing beyond difficult mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, programming, microfluidics, and a few things that were impossible. She knew none of these fields.



But holy smack-and-kerpow, Batman, could she talk. Soon she had investment money pouring in. On her board she got–yes–Henry everlovin’ Kissinger and James Mattis (uh-huh, that one,) and former Secretaries of State and Defense and just about every heavy hitter except Pope Francis. More money rained down. I mean with people like that vouching for her, Hank the Kiss and Mad Dog Mattis, it had to be legit–right? She even managed to cozy up to the Clintons and Obama.

Meanwhile the wretched blood gizmo wouldn’t, didn’t, and couldn’t as it turned out, work. It was a metal box with inside it a glue-gun robot arm out of Jersey–I am not inventing this–that made grinding noises and could do only a few tests with wildly unreliable results. You might think of it as Uncle Clunk. Just the thing you want your life to depend on. And lives do depend on good lab results.(“OK, lady, Uncle Clunk says you got brain cancer. We have to remove your brain.”) Heh. Oops.

So Holmes, who could talk the bark off a tree, faked it. To be fair, she probably thought it would work or hoped it might and turned to chicanery only when it didn’t. Anyway, many of her deceptions were clearly fraudulent–well, clearly if you knew about them. For example, most of her results were obtained using commercial analyzers from outfits like Siemens instead of Uncle Clunk. Financial projections were wildly dishonest. Many employees quit over ethhical concerns–but they were bound by sharp-fanged nondisclosure agreements they had to sign to be hired. It was nonsense. Nothing worked. But nobody knew.

Thing was, across America there was a terrific will to believe. Her story was just too good to pass up. People wanted a female Steve Jobs, a girl to join the boys in a startup world of wunderkind guys like Gates and Jobs and Wozniak and Zuckerberg and all. There just weren’t any girls. Sure, a few, sort of, a little bit, like Marissa Mayer at Google, but Page and Bryn were the real starters-up. Holmes was beautiful, smart, so very appealing and just a dynamite entrepreneur. She had this astonishingly successful company.

Which didn’t have a product.

Note that most of the dazzling university dropouts who became billionaires are in software, not biological sciences. The few in hardware brilliantly put together readily comprehended pieces, like CPUs and memory chips. There is a reason for this. Programming takes a lot of brains and little knowledge. Medicine takes reasonable intelligence and lots of knowledge. Molecular biology takes a lot of brains and a lot of knowledge. A (very) bright kid can learn Python or C-plus-plus in a couple of months in mommy’s basement and actually be a programmer. It doesn’t work with complicated multidisciplinary computerized micro-fluidized gadgets involving robotic glue-arms. At least, it didn’t work.

I wonder why nobody thought of this. When asked for evidence, she ducked, dodged, lied, said the check was in the mail, and any day now.

The non-disclosure agreements saved her, for a while. All employees had to sign them. Her lawyer, who was also on her board, was the scary super lawyer David Boies. If you were a midlevel lab worker, and knew that reagents were out of date, that bad results were being hidden, that Uncle Clunk didn’t work–and said so, a savage law firm with unlimited funds and, as events proved, not a lot of ethics, would litigate you into sleeping in alleys. Consequently much was known, but little was said.

Meanwhile–this is crazier than Aunt Sadie, that we kept in the attic–she got freaking Safeway and Walgreens to bite on putting Theranos booths in their stores so customers could get quick finger-prick analyses for very little money. Both companies bought into this, and actually built the booths at considerable expense, without insisting on seeing proof of her claims. I wonder what she was thinking. The scam obviously was going to collapse at some point. And did.



A better question might be what her board members and the chain-store executives were thinking. They were bosses of huge corporations and presumably astute. How did she get away with it? I will guess. Most of those gulled were old men, or nearly so. Note that old men, powerful men, rich men, and famous men, are nevertheless…men. Holmes was a honey, slender, very pretty, well-groomed, appealing, smart, and maybe the daughter or girlfriend or mistress that her prey would have liked.


Andrea Dworkin. Finally, a cure for self-abuse. Would the old guys on Elizabeth’s board have been as smitten by Andrea?
As the Wall Street Journal closed in, and Theranos got wind of it, things became ethically interesting. Holmes of course knew that Theranos was endangering lives, and had already established a lack of morality. Some of the board came to suspect and quietly bailed. The employees were intimidated, though several talked to the Journal anonymously.

But superlawyer David Boies and his associate Heather King among others at the firm knew. They tried every legal means, or maybe I mean lawyerly means, to block publication of the story. When federal regulatory agencies issued a long, detailed investigative report making it absolutely clear that Theranos did not even come close to legality, and was therefore endangering lives–Boies and King tried to suppress that too. Their success was not great as the Journal put the whole gorgeous taco online, but they tried. It is a curious fact, but a fact, that lawyers are often accessories to crime.

Anyway, great fun, great read.

It's all part of the current push of SJWs for women to LOVE THE SCIENCE, TO DO THE SCIENCE, which strangely enough encompasses nothing but lip-service to actually doing the science - something very boring to most people, extremely time-consuming where you have to have an insanely strong interest in it. Men can get interested in those things as I pored over chemical formulas myself in my teens, but even then - it takes years and years to become actually good at those kind of real-life applications. Software is another matter - I knew genius-level guys who were learning to program well in 4-6 months.

Post: #534

I'm currently reading Bad Blood and I wouldn't be surprised if the defense that Holmes uses in her trial is that Sunny Balwani was abusing and manipulating her, and thus she didn't have any control over her actions. She may use that defense in negotiations with federal prosecutors to try to get a plea deal with the goal of selling Balwani down the river while she gets off with a fine and lifetime ban from doing any kind of business in the medical field. I'm very curious if federal prosecutors have decided which of the two is "more guilty."

Post: #535

Oh - she will attempt to throw him under the bus. He knew about the technology even lass than she did. Probably was sold by her that they are going to make it work any day now.

He actually lost millions in the deal - probably not his full fortune, but certainly his investment going into almost 10 mio. $.

Post: #536

(07-06-2018 08:59 AM)C-Note Wrote:  I'm currently reading Bad Blood and I wouldn't be surprised if the defense that Holmes uses in her trial is that Sunny Balwani was abusing and manipulating her, and thus she didn't have any control over her actions. She may use that defense in negotiations with federal prosecutors to try to get a plea deal with the goal of selling Balwani down the river while she gets off with a fine and lifetime ban from doing any kind of business in the medical field. I'm very curious if federal prosecutors have decided which of the two is "more guilty."

If she gets away with that then the pussy pass is now codified in corporate defense law.

SHE WAS THE CEO.

Balwani was an executive under her.

Post: #537

(07-06-2018 10:00 AM)Enoch Wrote:  

(07-06-2018 08:59 AM)C-Note Wrote:  I'm currently reading Bad Blood and I wouldn't be surprised if the defense that Holmes uses in her trial is that Sunny Balwani was abusing and manipulating her, and thus she didn't have any control over her actions. She may use that defense in negotiations with federal prosecutors to try to get a plea deal with the goal of selling Balwani down the river while she gets off with a fine and lifetime ban from doing any kind of business in the medical field. I'm very curious if federal prosecutors have decided which of the two is "more guilty."

If she gets away with that then the pussy pass is now codified in corporate defense law.

SHE WAS THE CEO.

Balwani was an executive under her.

In the book it talks about how she would fix those unblinking, piercing blue eyes on people and then could, "talk the bark off tree" which is a hallmark of most successful hucksters. In one example, the board had decided to remove her as CEO and over two hours she talked them out of it. One of the members said, "I've never seen anything like it."

Based on that, if she decides on an abuse or similar defense, it may behoove prosecutors to get an all female jury so that that kind of tactic won't work as easily.

Post: #538

(07-06-2018 02:53 PM)C-Note Wrote:  Based on that, if she decides on an abuse or similar defense, it may behoove prosecutors to get an all female jury so that that kind of tactic won't work as easily.

A black and hispanic female jury would be twelve nails in her coffin. Minority women don't take kindly to uppity white women in politics or even at the same protest marches. In a courtroom situation I'd expect the dynamic to get even more catty. It definitely would not end well for bug eyed Holmes.

Post: #539

So I finished reading Bad Blood today, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a fairly solid (if 5% leftie-biased) account of how Holmes almost wound up killing people with unreliable test results and was only stopped because a handful of men (and one woman, belatedly) had the immense balls to stand up and blow the whistle on what the company was doing. Indeed, Carreyrou admits late in the book that had it not been for Tyler Shultz's parents putting up four hundred grand in legal fees for their son, and destroying their relationship with George Shultz, Tyler's grandfather who was on Theranos's board, Carreyrou would not have had a story.

Couple of meandering thoughts I had on this whole thing, and probably on Carreyrou's book too. Strap in, there's Nassim Taleb and The Last Psychiatrist ahead.

(1) Theranos knew how to put its employees' skin in its game.
Nassim Taleb holds that the average employee is essentially a slave because their prime concern is remaining employable. Employable, not employed. That is, employers are extremely good at putting employees' skin in the employer's game, but at the expense of how the employer's deeds might affect the public. This is particularly evident in the case of Theranos in two aspects:
(a) The fact that SuperIRT CEO, Sunny Baswani, used H1-Bs to bring in overly compliant Indians to surround himself inside Theranos. These guys' visas depended on remaining in Sunny's good graces. And they slotted right into classic Indian neo-Raj business practices where the boss is god and you are a piece of Punjabi shit he can kick around as he likes. Anyone who's worked for an Indian, Singaporean, or Asian boss of a certain age knows how Baswani conducted himself. Either way: these guys believed they had no choice but to tow the line at Theranos. This is putting an employee's skin in your game.
(b) The fact most of Theranos's employees signed confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements and then abided by them. Consider this: Theranos had about 800 employees at its height. Of these 800 (including or excluding those who were cycled through by the famously high staff turnover), we can see only roughly three who even dared to consider turning whistleblower. Three. Let's remember the way Carreyrou tells it, Theranos's practices and lies were not uncommon knowledge within Theranos, even with the fact it put groups of employees into silos. The word was going round all the time. But if you break a confidentiality agreement, even if you aren't sued into the ground, you are not exactly going to be seen as a team player in your next job interview. Again: employees have all their skin in the game of being employable, in part because lifetime jobs are no longer a thing.

(2) It's okay to commit fraud on software, not okay on medicine.
I found this a sort of peculiar ethical view for Carreyrou to take. I get that he was saying Holmes was influenced by old dotcom frauds like Larry Ellison and his Oracle vaporware, and Sunny Baswadi who thought he was experienced because he ditched a startup for 40 million or so, but Carreyrou seems to view these as less serious because all it cost was annoyance and lost time. But this way of looking at it reveals that Carreyrou clearly wouldn't have given a shit if, say, Zuckerberg had crashed and burned after overpromising on Facebook. On this analysis, Theranos did no harm either - nobody died as a result of Holmes' bullshit, the system worked, it caught everyone because a doctor was on the other end of the blood tests able to say "Hey, according to this potassium reading you should be in cardiac arrest right now, maybe let's do another test".

Either all fraud is wrong, or none of it is. Just because lives are potentially at risk doesn't make shitty vaporware any less ethical or any less deserving of sheeting home consequences to the makers.

(3) It wasn't 'fake it til you make it', Holmes thought she'd already made it
Carreyrou like most idiots suggests at the end of Bad Blood that Holmes might be a sociopath, but this is again to misidentify the great Western affliction running through its populace, and particularly so among people of Holmes' age with Holmes' parentage: narcissism.

Holmes was regularly exhorted by her father to 'live a purposeful life.' And my suspicion is that his definition of a purposeful life was to be in an office telling other people to do purposeful shit. Her father (Christian Rasmus Holmes IV; and Jesus fucking Christ, he named her brother Christian as well, making him Christian Holmes V, how much more narcissistic can you get than literally naming your kid the same as you, make him an extension of yourself?) is said to have "worked in the United States, Africa, and China as part of government agencies such as USAID." Her mother worked as a Congressional staffer.

That is, both of them had pretty much zero idea of living a purposeful life, because both of them were engaged in government jobs. Or worse still, they got the idea that their jobs were purposeful lives and imprinted that on Elizabeth.

Holmes basically seems to have come up with a Star-Trek-ish idea -- the pinprick blood test -- and having formed a company and a rough device to build it with, has then wrapped all of her activities around preserving her identity as someone living a purposeful life. Holmes goes all T-800 on people who tell her "But, the device doesn't work/we're misleading investors". She then demands, invariably, that they leave. These are the actions of someone who wants to be seen as something, someone whose identity is about convincing other people to accept the brand she is putting out. All those black turtlenecks, the affected deep voice? That's not modelling herself after Steve Jobs for the purposes of marketing (not alone, anyway), that's branding yourself and getting people to accept your brand ... because you have a crippling inability to connect with other people at your core, so you desperately try to create a brand for yourself that people will accept and like you for. (This crippling inability to connect actually powers your ability to be superficially persuasive, but that's another article entirely). The people who tell her these things are attempting to inflict narcissistic injuries -- injuries on her very identity, reminders that she does not exist in their lives -- to which the response is always denial, or rage.

(4) Holmes was good at giving old men hard-ons
This strikes me as the most potent weapon in her arsenal at the end of the day. She managed, in the end, to make like a Cinderella to a group of ageing Baby Boomers. From Richardson while she was still at Stanford right through to Obama to James Mattis to Henry fucking Kissinger, she combined the fact she was good-looking with the fact these men had all been getting along on superficial knowledge of a lot of subjects for their entire professional lives.

All of them were accustomed to making decisions without a deep and thorough knowledge of the subject matter at hand. In the case of the political morons, ex-Secretaries of State on, they'd been getting on by one or two-page briefing notes for years. In the case of most of the idiot venture capitalists who got sucked in, it was usually because "Nobody this young could gather this big a bunch of Baby Boomers around them unless they're selling really good weed or they've got a good supply of kids to fuck." Pretending you're an expert off summaries is a uniquely American delusion, and Theranos was just another particularly viral example of it. When Holmes did run into venture capitalists who knew the limitations of the technology because they knew the industry, she was shut down - or realised she'd been caught out - in a matter of minutes.

The issue isn't that Holmes lied to all these old silverbacks, it's that, in common with most of the dumbest generation of narcissists the world has ever known, they had no idea what they didn't know, and didn't even think to explore the limits of their ignorance. If anything, the presence of a bunch of distinguished politicians and generals on Theranos's board and the lack of a single person from the medical technology industry should have been a warning sign to any thinking investor that these idiots really didn't know what they were doing - or that these idiots were milking all they could out of a doomed venture. Indeed, the fact that David Boies, a fucking litigation lawyer, wound up on the board should have been the ultimate signal that it was time to run like fuck for the hills, because there you definitely had someone whose whole worldview comes down to what you can win in a fight.

When there are six ex-Presidents standing around watching someone dig a hole, you can be guaranteed that the entire road is shit.

"Holmes was a fake it til you make it person?" Nope, a narcissist. She put all the 'fake it til you make it' types on her board where they couldn't do her any harm. Let's remember she controlled about 99% of the voting rights on that board. Again, a bad signal.

By the way, there's a good question: why would you want to join a board when you have no power to actually influence the company's direction, to actually make any decisions?

Because it's about you being seen as something.

It's about you convincing yourself that you're not tired and old (Kissinger was 92, George Shultz in his 80s for fucks sake), it's about you convincing yourself that while your sons, daughters and grandsons are all disappointments because they didn't grow up to be extensions of you, while you are no longer great and are heading for the dirt nap, you still have one more shot to Be Someone - via this turtlenecked Valkyrie that reminds you of your idiot youth when you still had a penis. The last refuge of the old narcissist is that though he won't turn out to Be Someone, his daughter or granddaughter might.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #540

@paracelsus

Thank you for an amazing post, if not for the content then for the writing. Agreed that she can only take so much of the blame because the people who enabled her were just as narcissistic as Theranos.

Post: #541

(07-31-2018 09:31 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  When Holmes did run into venture capitalists who knew the limitations of the technology because they knew the industry, she was shut down - or realised she'd been caught out - in a matter of minutes.

Good VCs know how much they do not know about technology. They either trust famous professors at places like Stanford to vouch for a technology, or they hire a technical consulting firm to do the due diligence for them.

Who vouched for Theranos? Who did the due diligence?

What kind of idiot invests in a company just because Kissinger is on the board?

What kind of idiot allows his daughter's reputation to be shackled to an unproven technology?

Post: #542

^^^her father vouched for her. He should go to jail with her also. If it were a guy CEO he’d be history

Post: #543

Something else the Carryrou book made clear is that David Boise, the hot shot Silicon Valley lawyer involved in Theranos, needs to be disbarred from the practice of law. Anyone else in his law firm which was also involved in Theranos should be disbarred as well.

The lady lawyer (I forget her name) is, I believe, the same lawyer who tried to prevent the publication of the Harvey Weinstein expose as well. She seriously needs to be disbarred as well.

Post: #544

(07-31-2018 02:17 PM)fugly1000 Wrote:  ^^^her father vouched for her.

Father Holmes is an expert neither on microfluidics nor on biomedical sciences.

His endorsement is worth as much as a letter of recommendation from one's mother.

Post: #545

(07-31-2018 01:49 PM)Icarus Wrote:  

(07-31-2018 09:31 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  When Holmes did run into venture capitalists who knew the limitations of the technology because they knew the industry, she was shut down - or realised she'd been caught out - in a matter of minutes.

Good VCs know how much they do not know about technology. They either trust famous professors at places like Stanford to vouch for a technology, or they hire a technical consulting firm to do the due diligence for them.

Who vouched for Theranos? Who did the due diligence?

What kind of idiot invests in a company just because Kissinger is on the board?

What kind of idiot allows his daughter's reputation to be shackled to an unproven technology?

(08-01-2018 03:23 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

(07-31-2018 02:17 PM)fugly1000 Wrote:  ^^^her father vouched for her.

Father Holmes is an expert neither on microfluidics nor on biomedical sciences.

His endorsement is worth as much as a letter of recommendation from one's mother.

It wasn't her father who initially vouched for her. (In one of history's little ironies, he worked for - and got burned by - Enron, when it collapsed.)

If anyone gave her her first leg up and shining endorsement that enabled her to wreak havoc, it was Channing Robertson, an Associate Professor at Stanford (where Holmes went to university - in chemical engineering - before dropping out a couple of years in in order to found Theranos.) Robertson was one of the first people on Theranos's board and he agreed with her crazy schemes of absolute secrecy. And he was the first old guy who she gave a hard-on; he was one of the first ones who bought into her idea of a pinprick of blood being enough to diagnose diseases.

Carreyrou puts most of Holmes' "Overpromise for as long as you can" approach to coming from Larry Ellison, who'd done similar bullshit with Oracle sytems back in the 90s (as had pretty much every major tech company). The Ellison link came from swinging from one old guy's hard-on to the next: Ellison was connected to venture capitalist Don Lucas, who Holmes met through a college friend of her father. Tim Draper, of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was a neighbor of Holmes growing up (and he's actually dumb enough to still be defending her.)

It's a pretty incestuous set of connections. One of the big elements in bringing Holmes down was the work of the (asshole) Richard Fuisz, who tried to claim-jump a patent on Holmes, got pulverised legally for it, and then worked to connect the whistleblowers at Theranos with certain bloggers and eventually Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal. Fuisz was one of Holmes' neighbours as well.

Also significant in the book, and something that raised its value to me, was Carreyrou frankly pointing out (albeit paraphrased) that Holmes' stellar rise was, in part, sexism: Silicon Valley was desperate to pump out a female Steve Jobs, because assholes like Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg had basically married their money or weren't competent enough to actually run entire joints. Holmes was white, blonde, blue-eyed: perfect as an image for women to push the "Women Can Do This Shit Too" angle, which is another reason none of the journalists dug in too deeply on her story.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #546

Post: #547

^
Aside from financial / medical fraud related charges.
What are the chances of certain investors looking to civil suits?

Post: #548

(08-05-2018 10:32 PM)CynicalContrarian Wrote:  What are the chances of certain investors looking to civil suits?

That's already happened. My understanding is that given that she didn't have much in the way of liquid assets, she settled with most key players by turning over large portions of her stock holdings to them.

That was probably the best option they would ever have, given that no one will ever trust her with any serious investment again, so attempting to get cash from her would have been a lost cause.

Post: #549

(08-05-2018 10:47 PM)Suits Wrote:  That's already happened. My understanding is that given that she didn't have much in the way of liquid assets, she settled with most key players by turning over her stock holders to them.
That was probably the best option they would ever have, given that no one will ever trust her with any serious investment again, so attempting to get cash from her would have been a lost cause.

Bloody patriarchy...

Post: #550

Theranos Is Formally Dissolving

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-0...dissolving

Quote:It is only fitting that John Carreyrou, who broke the Theranos scandal story and laid it out for the world would be the WSJ writer who also wrote the company's epitaph, which he did last night when the WSJ reported that the scandal-plagued blood-testing company accused of perpetrating Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud, will soon cease to exist.

In an email to shareholders (apparently those still exist), the company said it would formally dissolve, and would seek to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash in coming months.

The company's overdue end comes after the feds filed criminal charges against Theranos founder, and frequent Clinton Global Initiative guest and speaker, Elizabeth Holmes and the blood-testing company’s former No. 2 executive, alleging that they defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and defrauded doctors and patients.

The trigger for the dissolution was Theranos' breach of a covenant governing the $65 million loan it received from Fortress last year. Under the loan terms, Fortress was entitled to foreclose upon the company’s assets if its cash fell beneath a certain threshold.

Quote:In the email to shareholders, sent Tuesday, Theranos General Counsel and Chief Executive Officer David Taylor said the company is trying to negotiate a settlement with Fortress that would give the New York private-equity firm ownership of the company’s patents but leave its remaining cash—estimated at about $5 million—for distribution to other unsecured creditors.

Under a liquidation process known as “an assignment for the benefit of creditors,” getting that remaining cash to the unsecured creditors could take six to 12 months, Taylor said in the email.

And so the company that was once valued in the billions is now fighting to preserve a few million for other creditors upon liquidation. The "value" left over for equity? $0.

Not that anyone was expecting more: most of Theranos’s remaining two-dozen employees worked their last day on Friday, Aug. 31. Only the General Counsel and a handful of support staff remain on the payroll for a few more days.

Theranos' liquidation followed a failed attempt to sell the company, when over four months Jefferies reached out on Theranos’s behalf to more than 80 potential buyers, and executed nondisclosure agreements with 17 of those parties, the email said, adding: “We assisted those parties with diligence and had numerous follow-on conversations.”

Nobody bothered to proceed.

After the liquidation, the big-name investors who poured money into Theranos will get nothing. All told, investors in Theranos have lost nearly $1 billion.

At least they will have their freedom, but the same can not be said for Elizabeth Holmes: the Theranos’s founder and her ex-boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June. Balwani was Theranos’s president and chief operating officer until he retired from the company in May 2016. If convicted, they each face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution to those found to have been defrauded, on each count.