FRAUD

Lehman Brothers has been using financial engineering to hide its problems. The firm is not as strong as management claims.

I lost $35,000 to a Ponzi scheme. It was the worst and best thing that ever happened to my finances.

Yield is just a word for where the money is coming from. And if you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield.

Effective altruism is about maximizing the good you can do. I thought building a massive company was the fastest way to generate the capital to give away. I was wrong about a lot of things.

I didn't steal funds. I made risk management mistakes. There's a difference.

I think most people in crypto are well-intentioned. That said, there are clearly some bad actors. It's important to separate the two.

The lesson from IRL is simple: if your growth looks too good to be true, audit it. Because your investors won't. They'll just write bigger checks.

We reported 20 million monthly active users. The SEC found that 95% of them were bots. Ninety-five percent. I don't know how to explain that in a way that sounds good.

SoftBank valued us at $1.2 billion. A billion dollars for what turned out to be an app with one million real users and nineteen million bots. That's $1,200 per real user.

We raised $200 million total. The board found out the metrics were fake and shut the company down in a week. From unicorn to dead in seven days.

I genuinely believed we were building something people wanted. The user numbers looked incredible. I should have asked harder questions about where they were coming from.

I resigned as CEO after the Hindenburg Research report. They called us a fraud. I called them short sellers. The market decided who was right.

We said we had 100,000 pre-orders. The SEC found that most of them were non-binding expressions of interest, not real orders. There's a difference. We should have been clearer about that difference.

We told investors AI was doing the bookkeeping. Investors loved it. The problem was, humans were doing the bookkeeping. The AI wasn't ready. We shipped the marketing before we shipped the technology.

We had 500 employees doing manual bookkeeping while our pitch deck said AI handled 90% of the work. When Forbes started asking questions, there was no good answer.

I founded Theranos at 19 because I was afraid of needles. I wanted to run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. The vision was real. The technology wasn't.

We were valued at $9 billion. I was the youngest female self-made billionaire. Then John Carreyrou called and everything unraveled. One journalist with a source inside the company ended it all.

This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.

I was convicted on four counts of fraud. I am going to prison. I still believe the mission was right. The execution — I take responsibility for the execution.

We had Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis, and Rupert Murdoch on our board. The most powerful men in America believed in Theranos. None of them asked to see the data. Not one.

I wore the same black turtleneck every day. People compared me to Steve Jobs. The difference is Steve Jobs had a product that worked.

I believed in this company until the very end. I am as shocked as anyone that 1.9 billion euros do not exist.

Our Asia business is growing 40 percent year over year. The partnerships we have built there are extraordinary.

Fraud detection at PayPal was an arms race. The fraudsters were incredibly creative. We had to be more creative.

I ran 9.58 seconds and it made me millions. Then I trusted the wrong people with those millions. Speed doesn't help with financial fraud.

Ultimately, in order for us to see less fraud in the market, there needs to be real repercussion to engaging in fraud.

If I try to go after every company that was engaged in some level of exploitation, then I wouldn't have time in the day, because I think most companies are.