Matt Levine, Columnist

Theranos Didn’t Just Harm Investors

Also Berkshire without Buffett, Bitcoin custody and mindfulness.

June 18, 2018 at 3:01 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Oh, Theranos.

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos Inc., its founder and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Holmes, and its former President Sunny Balwani with fraud. The allegations were that Theranos, Holmes and Balwani lied to the investors who gave Theranos hundreds of millions of dollars to build a blood-testing device that used only a finger-prick sample of blood; Theranos never really built a working device, but went around saying or implying that it had. Holmes and Theranos settled with the SEC, and I wrote at the time that Holmes seemed to have gotten off lightly, paying only a $500,000 fine (plus giving up millions of worthless Theranos shares) for her role in a $700 million fraud. I also wrote: