Re: the only penalty is 'you can't do that again for 10 years'
"I think it was a scam for personal profit -- just one that didn't work. But even if I'm wrong, it's still a scam. Whether it was for personal profit or not isn't that important."
I'm not trying to absolve her - what she did was defraud a stunning amount of money off some incredibly stupid investors (like Rupert Murdoch, for instance). But Holmes has run profitable businesses previously, and had no real reason to dump those for Theranos. She could quite easily have dumped just 10% of her shares when the company was valued at $10 billion and done a runner; if it was a scam, it worked beyond the wildest dreams of most scammers and she never pulled the trigger.
The only way that her behaviour makes sense is if she hoped to achieve her claims and never really accepted that she couldn't do it, and so lied through her teeth to get more funding to piss away attempting the impossible. That's still wrong - she took people's cash, pissed it away, and then lied about having done so - but it's somewhat less reprehensible than taking other people's money and keeping as much of it as you can.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
