Writing this, I’m someone who has always backed criminal justice reform, much fewer people are in prison and prison is about building people versus caging them.
It’s a sad thing we have people who grew up without parents serving 10+ years for things like drug crimes.
Holmes isn’t that though.
Elizabeth Holmes is a person who grew up relatively wealthy that thought she was too good for Stanford and defrauded people out of 945 million.
Lied to investors
Lied to 800+ employees who lost their jobs.
Lied to patients who thankfully very few were in seriously bad health.
And the reason why she should serve over a decade in prison is an example for a lot of Silicon Valley and the tech industry.
When I was travelling, I met with some guys making TikTok videos and they asked if I’d want to promote crypto projects.
All of them bragged they were paid in those coins pre-release and would make 20-30x the initial payment when released.
Looked at which coins and found all of them were backed by major angels or VC funds.
None of these projects were legitimate and all aware they were effectively pumping up a scam.
And that’s one easier to track example.
I knew a founder who had a media company with 20-30 employees, where they average age had to be like 25.
Ran out of funding and lied to the staff about new investors coming in.
Ended up having staff working several months unpaid/partially paid until shut down randomly.
That founder ended up going on TV, getting consulting gigs and new ventures.
Some staff members were evicted from their apartments, because the landlord didn’t take their bosses IOU.
And those are simple examples of what’s really going on out there.
I’ve seen founders raise money from major VC funds, use funds to hire third party dev firms and take kickbacks.
I’ve seen misleading user statistics in paid PR efforts to raise money for a product.
I’ve seen a lot of money raised for products that never actually existed and people bragged about getting money lying about the product.
Hell, I once had lunch with a VC who openly told me he invested in a blockchain project, was aware it was crap and offed it for a return to another group.
For a decade, I’ve met a ton of awesome people building companies, software, inventions and more.
I’d want to say 95%+ of them are legitimate and awesome people.
But there are the 5% who go the Holmes route, take a lot of sketchy shortcuts and normally they walk off a consultant making $250,000+ a year, while investors, employees and customers get burnt.
So yeah, let her sit in jail for decades.