Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, has been ordered to pay half a million dollars in restitution for bilking investors out of a ton of cash. Since she was chosen to be a ‘global ambassador’ by Obama, she received lots of positive press coverage and used it to raise capital. Now things have changed.
Townhall reports:
CEO Charged With Multi-Million Dollar Fraud Was an Obama ‘Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship’
On Wednesday, the SEC settled a lawsuit against Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes forcing her to cede control of her company and pay a $500,000 fine in response to charges that she used her position to perpetrate a “massive fraud” scheme. The SEC believes that Holmes ultimately bilked her investors out of more than $700 million in return for faulty medical technology and empty promises to revolutionize the healthcare industry.
According to the original SEC lawsuit, Holmes systematically deceived investors in a variety of ways. Often, she would make fantastical claims that her engineers had developed revolutionary new technologies and machines, including a “miniLab” blood analyzer that would use one tiny finger prick sample to “perform approximately 90 percent of the tests that a large, traditional central lab could perform.”
This understandably generated not just investments, but a good amount of positive media attention. The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New York Times all published glowing articles about Holmes.
We’re guessing we won’t hear much about this story on CNN or MSNBC.
(Image:Source)
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