Theranos-Style Fraud Has Become the Norm
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
but jobs actually delivered.
We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.
Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)
That's not the biggest problem by far. They started out catering to literal pedos, look into the r/jailbait controversy.
There’s a long history of revenge porn and other nonconsensual porn showing up there and being hard to remove.
The whole site had been declining badly too, and is loaded with bots. Still an okay place to get news in some areas but pretty meh and the comments are always echo chambers.
Interesting comparison to compare the "standard" software fraudulence of fudging your activity numbers to Theranos' fraud.
I think when it comes down to it, it's a false equivalence - one is a temporary measure done to overcome an inherently short-term critical mass limitation, the second is an indefinite fraud trying to paint an impossible company as real.
"Fake it till you make it" is a legitimate and almost necessary strategy for an early-stage startup, I wouldn't conflate it with Theranos' fraud.
I think that's what you're saying, at least.
In your opinion, does this make them any more or less guilty of fraud?
Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.
After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?
explain
> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.
Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.
If so then you you have one more example now.
Never done it on something that huge but I’ve been burned on one or two kickstarter type things.
If you can’t pay and then take delivery it doesn’t exist.
Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds.
I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?
And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.
Now you've got a third of the country who are just totally ok with fraud if its perpetrated by someone on their team.
Nearly all tech billionaires are on their team.
FTX, Terra-Luna, Nikola (as mentioned), Builder.ai, Frank, Kalder, Joonko
O and have you heard about the AI labs and how they calculate ARR? lol.
Statistically significant though? I do not know.