Comment by labrador
11 hours ago
It's fascinating to me that the upper classes find Holmes interesting. In the working class world I grew up in, chicks like her are a dime a dozen and can usually be found at Grateful Dead tribute concerts espousing the benefits of crystals and channeling her alien guide who she discovered while chanting an invented baby talk language high on molly and nitrous oxide.
Your comparison missed the actual interesting part about the billion dollar fraud.
People who commit fraud at that scale are not a dime a dozen.
They usually steal the weed and shrooms out of your backpack because you weren't using them at the moment.
People who commit fraud on this scale are simply those who start at this scale. Not always the super wealthy but often the super wealthy and sometimes those with social ties to the super wealthy.
They were taken with her blue-blood "high WASP" background. Elites put a premium on pedigree (because they benefit from theirs!) and so they just loved the fact that her ancestors started Fleischmann Yeast even though her fam squandered their inheritance within 2 generations. Part of the reason her parents put so much pressure on her to become wealthy was to try and claw back that generational wealth they felt they were owed. Her dad in particular was very bitter over how dad had lost a load of money on bad investments in Hawaii. He then flopped at his oil career (Enron) and never got over his family's loss of wealth and status.
If you read Bad Blood there are quotes from her wealthy investors saying things like "well, her great-grandfather was a famous surgeon so medicine runs in her family!" as part of their decision to invest in her.
Generational wealth is often squandered within a couple generations. The first generation can often times keep it together, but the generation after that and beyond have no connection to the origins. If Elizabeth Holmes’s parents were upset at their loss of wealth, it’s because they had no special abilities that would make them good capital allocators.
It’s quite interesting and can be both. Many well-of friends have a period of rejecting their heritage and end up abusing all kinds of things, only to later fall back into the lane so to speak. Some lose it completely tho.
I learned of an interesting case of this in the film "The Sunshine Makers" about LSD production in California in the 1960's. Billy Hitchcock was a wealthy heir to the Gulf Oil fortune who financed the labs but eventually went back to being a protected rich guy by betraying his chemists.
Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies because they are used to things working out for them and so are often less skeptical / guarded(generally speaking) if the lie sounds good.
I grew up with the mindset being told if things were too good to be true they probably were and to expect failure and be pleasantly surprised if things worked out. This is practical advice for many lower to middle class individuals, but it can also hold you back because you stop looking for genuine opportunities. Better advice would be to do your due diligence.
With Holmes, and hindsight is always 20/20, it should have been obvious that she was full of shit. As you say, I have met dozens of people, men and women, like her, that just lie reflexively and I have learned to spot them from a mile away and avoid them at all costs. If you catch someone lying or exaggerating something inconsequential, and by that, I mean it really does not in any way help them or get them out of trouble, it is easy to brush it off as a white lie, but it is the people who will lie for no reason at all who are the most dangerous because you can be assured that they will lie when they do have a reason.
Most people (including rich ones) who had any scientific knowledge passed on investment/partnership. Humanity has developed ways to evaluate ideas without all of the contextual noise people are referencing in this thread. They’re just effortful and sometimes awkward, so too many people of all types just don’t.
Always good to pass on any opportunity you don’t fully understand. You may miss some opportunities, but you will also miss being taken as a fool.
I think particularly in the case of investors it's that they're pretty comfortable with founders that straddle the fine line between bullish and bullshit, because the ones who back up their claims that seem too good to be true make them money, and the ones who don't are priced in. And some who make them lots of money tell a lot of "white lies" on the way. FOMO is a way of missing red flags too.
Holmes' mistake was to massively overdo the "fake it til you make it" in a regulated industry where the implications of the lies appal people, as well as to have a product that was never going to work so the lies were more "this car definitely isn't just rolling down the hill" than "the person at the wheel is only for regulatory reasons". If she'd settled for fantasy metrics and self dealing in a real estate play rather than faking medical tests she'd have investors lining up to fund her second venture...
I'm more intrigued by how she managed to keep customers and at least some of her employees believing and how often that mask slipped.
From what I know, extreme compartmentalization of information, to the extent it seriously harmed whatever chances there might have been to pivot to some kind of realistic product.
And then an extremely tight circle of people she knew she could manipulate. Liars hate people that see through their lies and get rid of them as soon as possible or otherwise try to ruin them.
I think there was an internet meme somewhere, that suggested something along the lines of: if you consider pain to be an essential learning signal, and that beyond a certain level of wealth, you can more or less eliminate pain, then the cognitive effects of such wealth is like being kicked in the head by a horse on a daily basis.
It was a tweet: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
> Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies.
I agree with this point. I think that in the investment world, many VCs investing in deep tech are not deeply familiar with the underlying technology. They often say they are betting on the founders, which can inadvertently encourage this behavior, since founders know that their investors are unlikely to scrutinize the technical details too closely.
VCs are typically kinda gullible because they are primed to believe and sometimes do not have the technical background to really do proper due diligences.
Those don't seem like particularly lower class attributes, I know many trust fund babies that are jam band wooks/roadies that could be described this way.
Well, in the upper class, they aren't dime a dozen.
(Btw, your comment filled me with warmth, thanks. I also recommend Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" [1].)
[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html
Woah woah woah, lets not bring molly into this. The greatest drug on the planet has nothing to do with new-age nonsense. Nitrous on the other hand...
I agree. I should have said shrooms!
You should have mentioned cocaine, meth, anything that strips away your ability to empathize. If she took shrooms she’d have had some connection to her fellow humans.
Those who make fun of crystals fail to realize that technology is literally a race to who can etch the finest/smallest inscriptions into the most perfect crystals. Followed by who can best feed the knowledge of the world into those very crystals via optimal mechanations such that those crystals produce intelligence.
What does that have to do with what parent is referring to?
Both use the word "crystal." That's it.