I was given as a Christmas present, the book on the failure of Theranos. It was founded by Elizabeth Holmes in Silicon Valley in 2003. You can get a copy of the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X
It's a good read and well paced. The second half of the book is the real meat of the story and the author increases the pace nicely as the startup unravels.
It is impossible not to draw parallels with another startup by a university dropout; the young man that started Facebook, his name, Mark Zuckerberg. Think about it; both Holmes and Zuckerberg became rich very quickly, were university dropouts from prestigious institutions, neither ideas were all that original, but they received big backing. Call me a skeptical old fool if you like, but I find all this somewhat suspicious.
The book talks about plans to have Theranos providing rapid blood tests on the battlefield. Their machines would be placed in the back of Humvees. They had on their board people like James 'Mad Dog' Mattis, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. Clearly these plans were very real.
But who was Elizabeth Holmes exactly? How did she get such backing so rapidly?
The same can be said of Mark Zuckerberg. He received large sums setting him up rather quickly. His idea wasn't original at all and you could argue others were already doing it better.
What I'm suggesting is that both were recruited by the US security apparatus while undergraduates. They were set up by the government funneling funds through venture capitalists. Facebook was to farm personal data and ultimately control political thought on the internet, while Theranos was to provide biological data across the whole US population, but the US military in particular. One was successful, while Theranos was discarded, for whatever reason. Maybe compulsory vaccination and mRNA gene therapy was preferred.
This is all speculation, but think about it.
[Edit to add @ 04 Jan 2022; Holmes has been found guilty on 4 of the 11 charges she faced in court recently
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