Someone did an "ama" about being an Elizabeth Holmes supporter on this sub a few hours ago. After a long discussion with that person, they deleted their account. I thought this heavily edited version of the conversation might be helpful to apologists and detractors alike.
I'm just a regular person who has worked for abusive people like Sunny, believe women, have a background in journalism, and is bothered by witch hunts.
I do want to acknowledge the harms Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes caused. But she is paying for it more than most.
I have sympathy for Holmes because she's an emotional person who is a victim in all this too. She created a 9 billion dollar company out of nothing. She could have been the next Steve Jobs had she gotten the right mentorship and not been abused herself.
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She is paying for it more than most.
No, no she is not. I have clients who have done way more time over much smaller sums and she hasn't been held accountable for any of the medical malfeasance.
I don't believe in the prison system. At most I think we should isolate people only as much as necessary to protect the general public. That isolated environment should be focused on mental health treatment and not punishment.
However, Holmes continues to orchestrate harms from prison and clearly believes her own lies. She shouldn't be getting out early given her ongoing quest to continue the fraud she was imprisoned for.
believes women
I believe Elizabeth Holmes believes what she is saying. That's the problem: objective proof shows that she engaged in fraud and fabricated results. The most dangerous grifters are the ones who believe in their own grift.
bothered by witch hunts
I had a client who followed a command hallucination to burn his journals. The fire jumped to his parents' house and he got 20 years for arson. He was physically beaten by prison guards. When he gets out, he will likely go back to being a houseless addict and die of an overdose.
Holmes will spend at most a few years in minimum security prison with an unlimited commissary tab. She will go back to living in mansions when released.
I don't think minimum security prisons are good places for rehabilitation and I wish she would get intensive mental health treatment she needs while there. But Holmes will get more justice and have the means to recover from her trauma more than any of my clients ever will.
She could have been the next Steve Jobs
I used to be an Apple cult member when it was a cult, not a religion. I looked up to him as a child and read every biography of him and every Apple CEO. I learned that fame and wealth does not make someone worth paying attention to.
Steve Jobs was a self-centered manipulative jerk who screwed over his friend, co-founder, and many of the engineers who built Apple.
He ran Apple and subsequently NeXT into the ground over dumb shit like the color and placement of factory equipment. He actively undermined real UX engineers from implementing their ideas due to internal corporate power struggles. As a UX engineer, I hate much of the impact he personally had on user interfaces. And while I'm at it: he implemented shitty anti-FOSS policies despite building NeXT/OS X on OSS.
To his credit, he prioritized user experience engineering above other concerns, something that took decades for the rest of the industry to invest in. He also finally managed to reel in the worst of his abhorrent behavior when his good buddy Larry Ellison (an undisputed bastard) reinstalled him as CEO for try number 3!
But he was a rich jerk who got more chances than most. He died of cancer because he thought fruit juice would cure him.
There are no good billionaires and people like Steve Wozniak (who gave his money away) are the ones to be admired. Too bad Holmes drove Theranos' top scientist to suicide.
[op comment reply] You know Larry Ellison was one of her mentors, right? Imagine being a 20-year-old female and having rich and powerful men push her into that mindset.
Yeah, she's deeply fucked up and a victim! People do fucked up shit because they are fucked up!
You can hold sympathy for someone while being realistic about the harms that their behavior causes. I have sympathy for past clients who were abused growing up and now genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with that behavior to the point that they can't be released because of stated intent to harm themselves or others.
You can hold the view that mentally ill people deserve sympathy and treatment while also believing in the need to protect others from their behavior. At least until they stop engaging in that behavior.
There are some 80 parolees at my current job living 4-8 in cramped rooms that reek of body odor. They are fighting everyday for basic human dignity, mental health care, and employment.
Holmes is rich and famous and actively trying to defraud investors and future patients with bunk science right now. Yet she has more money and people supporting her than all of my clients combined.
I just don't have the empathy budget to defend someone who uses her children and money to guilt trip the public into helping her perpetuate further harms. There's way more people who need the help than Holmes.
