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If this is not Culture War tell me, but I'm flabbergasted, I have to share that with you all.
So it seems there is a documentary out about Elizabeth Holmes. I had no idea until I stumbled across this trailer, and at first I thought it was a movie. Because it looks like a movie. And I thought this was two actors and one, at least, of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer.
No, it would seem this is indeed the one, the only, the real genuine pure-quill Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy herself. And all I can say is holy crap.
Because she looks nuts. She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".
It seems to be shot like a film, there has to be a hefty dose of acting going on because the guy playing? being? the director/narrator of the documentary looks like he is acting the part of "guy reacting to something he doesn't trust" with the hanging open mouth and sucking his tongue etc. reaction. But it seems like the filming really was that weird.
Gosh amighty. And there's a small child, a real small child and not "the script needs a baby" child actor, in this and everything. That really makes me concerned, because I would not leave that woman in charge of a goldfish.
The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both. Because that kind of "pop your eyes wide open until the balls nearly fall out and stare unblinkingly and hold that stare for minutes" kind of behaviour, that is not normal.
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades? Did the crazy only come out later?
A lot of hard-nosed business people are actually pretty bad at sniffing out fraud even if they try. Furthermore, a lot of them simply don't give a fuck. Venture capitalists make a lot of bets. They expect most of them to not pay out, and for the few that do pay out to more than cover the bad bets. Mahayoshi Son of SoftBank is probably the best example of that. If the reason the bet didn't pay out is because of fraud, that's not really much different than it failing to pay out because of internal failures or acts of God. After all, you did your due diligence. You met with the founders and they made all the right mouth noises while pointing at a hockey stick graph projected onto the wall. You couldn't have possibly known there was a fraud going on, so you face no unique downside.
That just seems like throwing away free alpha. If the average legitimate venture capital investment opportunity generates such high returns in expectation that it can make up for rampant fraud, then a fraud-savvy investor could earn even greater returns by discriminating and getting these lucrative opportunities without the fraudulent ones weighing them down. Even if you can't avoid internal failures or acts of God, every case that you do nonrandomly avoid is free money.
Yeah but if you manage to completely sniff out everything that's fraudulent you're probably costing yourself since there's sufficient businesses that start fraudulent/have intervening periods of insolvency that they make it through via bloodymindedness, nobody calling their bluff and market exuberance. Plus however you want to diagnose companies that lurch around from an original okay-but-not-great idea and end up landing on something that works later on. If you were smart enough to not invest in the original idea, you may have missed out on the second iteration.
Also sufficient 'regulatory arbitrage' cases in business where it's just a fight to the death between regulators and spurious crazy people. Uber seems to have worked. Maybe Kalshi/Polymarket work or don't work out in the end but the fraudulence ratio has swung around wildly throughout the whole enterprise.
Early in Microsoft they had OS builds filled with fatal bugs. Practically unusable software. Bill Gates would demo it to potential customers and investors. He carefully avoided the many actions that would crash it and falsely presented it as working. His software demos really impressed people. Later they mostly fixed the bugs and delivered something like working software to customers.
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