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From the NYT:
Caught in the Theranos Wreckage: Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch and Walmart’s Waltons
By REED ABELSON and KATIE THOMAS MAY 4, 2018
Even some of the world’s richest people may get duped, according to newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit filed on behalf of investors in the failing blood-testing company Theranos. …
Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, promised to revolutionize the lab industry using a few drops of blood from a simple finger-prick to look for everything from diabetes to cancer, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional blood test.
The company became a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with investors awarding the privately held company a valuation of around $9 billion. But the story began to unravel in October 2015 after The Wall Street Journal, owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., began questioning whether the tests worked. …
Theranos had always boasted a star-studded list of investors and directors — its board included the former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, two former United States senators, and Gen. Jim Mattis, the current secretary of defense. But while some high-profile investors’ links to Theranos had been previously known, the new documents provide a detailed list of financial amounts….
The Walton family invested about $150 million in 2014 through two separate entities, according to the investor list. Mr. Murdoch put in about $125 million, and the extended family of Ms. DeVos invested about $100 million. …
Other prominent investors, according to the list, included the Cox family; the Atlanta billionaires who own the media conglomerate Cox Enterprises and who invested $100 million; and a company affiliated with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that put in about $30 million. Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, invested $1 million.
And think how much they would have lost investing in Ms. Holmes if only America’s elites weren’t so biased against women.
