Maybe Theranos found Elizabeth Holmes isn't as awful as we thought. At her trial for multiple accounts of fraud, prosecutors revealed that members of the oligarchy were suckered into investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the bogus technology. Hurray for Elizabeth!
From Ars Technica:
In the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the jury heard that the matchmaker was Daniel Mosley, the estate attorney for former secretary of state and Theranos board member Henry Kissinger. In less than two years, Mosley connected several wealthy families and individuals with Theranos, ultimately bringing it over $400 million in investments, a significant portion of the estimated $900 million to $1.3 billion that the startup raised over its lifetime.
The list of Mosley-introduced investors, most of them his clients, reads like a who's who list of the rich and powerful. The DeVos family, which made its money from founding Amway, put in $100 million, as did the Cox family, which controls Cox Enterprises, a media, telecom, and automotive conglomerate. The Walton family of Walmart fame invested $150 million, while Andreas Dracopoulos, a Greek shipping heir, put up $25 million. Kissinger himself was good for $3 million, and Mosley for $6 million. Kissinger's friends who were not Mosley's clients, including the Oppenheimer family (which formerly controlled the diamond miner DeBeers), invested another $24 million.
A sobering thought: these investors are the people who keep senators and congresspeople as well-trained pets, so there are probably laws on the books that ensure they get to recoup their losses at taxpayer expense. Oh well, the schadenfreude was fun while it lasted!
