Elizabeth Holmes, the formerly celebrated founder of Theranos, just got hit with a jail term of 11 years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Along with these, there have been stories about massive layoffs: Meta axes 13 per cent of its workforce, or about 11,000 people; Amazon lays off 10,000 staff, mostly those in core areas such as engineering and marketing; and Google (Alphabet) is under pressure from activist investor TCI to do much the same for cost-cutting reasons.
All this may add up to a “techno-winter” (if not a general recession), one might think; surely the “crypto-winter” is already in progress. But is that really true? I believe there are three separate things going on, and it does not make sense to mingle all of them and seek solutions. The first is just plain old-fashioned grift; the second is the normal churn in business models and the third is whether crypto makes sense.
There are always major scams in the US: examples include Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the Lehman Brothers meltdown. There is the spectacle of supposedly sensible people (e.g. bankers and venture capitalists) being completely bamboozled by a smooth-talking person with a spreadsheet, with the result that lots of investor’s (and taxpayers’) money goes down the drain.
Elizabeth Holmes seems to have hoodwinked the whos-who of not only Silicon Valley’s VCs, but also name-brand politicians and captains of industry and got them on her board of directors. I mean,…
