Ramesh Balwani is a Pakistani born American Hindu. He was the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos. Theranos is known for its allegedly false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests that used very small amounts of blood such as that which can be extracted from a fingerstick. He is currently facing multiple charges from the SEC but maintains his innocence.
Ramesh was also dating the founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose net worth went from $9 billion (Forbes) to $0 as her company was forced into bankruptcy. They immediately broke up afterwards. Ramesh claims he quit the company but Elizabeth claims she fired him.
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a naturalized US citizen born in Pakistan. Are there any scenarios (no matter how improbable) that he could be stripped of his US citizenship and sent back to Pakistan?
Could you imagine how funny a sitcom would be where a defeated and deported Sunny runs zany scams every week to get back to the US?
For some of you that may have been looking at the tech world of Silicon Valley for the last 10-15 years, or even the last month, you may have heard of a company called Theranos (short for "Therapeutic Diagnostics"), whose executives Elizabeth Homles and Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani are currently being tried in court in the US for fraud. For those of you that haven't heard of it, read on, and then keep reading to see its Indian connection.
Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 into a fairly wealthy American family (not crazy wealthy but quite well off). Her father, Christian Holmes IV, was a high level executive at Enron before the company went bankrupt (the Enron scandal made ripples in India too). After high school, she was admitted to Stanford's Chemical Engineering undergraduate programme. However, she soon proved to be far too ambitious for a formal education and training. At Stanford, she worked as an undergraduate assistant helping a PhD student named Shaunak Roy, who was born to Indian immigrants in Chicago. His research was on microfluidics, an exciting field that studies fluid properties and reactions at extremely low speeds and tiny volumes.
After her first year, Elizabeth came up with the idea of a "smart patch" - a skin patch that would painlessly conduct an in-situ blood test on patients wearing it, figure out the right dosage of a drug to administer, and also administer that drug through the skin. Nice idea, except that it was physically impossible as per a Stanford medical professor that she discussed it with. This rejection didn't stop Holmes, who filed a provisional patent application within a week. Apparently in the US, you can file patents for "inventions" that haven't even been invented yet. This was the beginning of Holmes' obsession with medical devices and revolutionizing them through what seems like (and was) science fiction. This was also about the time when the aura around Steve Jobs of the iPhone fame was being constructed, and everyone in Silicon Valley wanted to be the next messiah of technology.
After Shaunak graduated, Elizabeth decided to drop out of Stanford at age 19. They co-founded a new company, Theranos, to combine Elizabeth's "vision" with Shaunak's background in microfluidics. The aim was to build a consumer device that could conduct hundreds of blood tests at home through a tiny pinprick on the finger - think a glucometer but in the world of Star Trek. For funding, Elizabeth tapped into her family'
... keep reading on reddit ➡By Molly Roberts | Editorial Writer | Link to article
Two villainesses have captured the nation’s attention from the courtroom this week.
Or is that two victims?
Elizabeth Holmes and Ghislaine Maxwell stand accused of very different crimes. The now-disgraced Silicon Valley golden girl allegedly duped investors into thinking her company’s blood-testing technology could detect disease with a pinprick.
The New York socialite-in-exile, meanwhile, allegedly trafficked teenage girls as young as 14 for financier Jeffrey Epstein and his rich friends to rape.
Yet these women have seized on similar strategies for their defense: Blame the men.
Start with the wannabe magician who lied her way to a $9 billion valuation. Holmes fooled doctors and funders and pharmacies and everyday folks. Now, however, she’s claiming she was the mark.
Her board of directors — mostly a bunch of distinguished, aging gentlemen including Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and George P. Shultz — didn’t give her good enough advice, she says. Those scientists and engineers who she claimed were changing the world? They didn’t trust her too much; she trusted them too much. They told her that her miracle machine worked. She, innocent and ignorant, merely relayed that information to the public.
And then there’s Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh Balwani, her partner in (maybe) crime and, at one point, in love.
Better known as Sunny, the right-hand man was, in his former girlfriend’s retelling, actually a puppet master. The subject is touchy, and serious: Holmes charges Balwani with emotional and sexual abuse. She says he told her he was “astonished” at her “mediocrity,” that she had to “kill the old Elizabeth” to become stronger. He forced her to sleep with him, she says, “because he wanted me to know he still loved me.”
The reported conduct (which Balwani denies) is appalling. But can abuse excuse abuse? Or does exploiting trauma as an excuse for hurting others only cause more harm?
The case is simpler when it comes to those movers and shakers Holmes got to put their stamps on her sham. Holmes played on her femininity to impressive effect, even as she modulated her voice to a baritone and her wardrobe to a black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs sendup. She caught the notice of powerful men because she emphasized, in adopting these traits so incongruous with her appearance, that she wasn’t o
... keep reading on reddit ➡