All I had to know was that Henry Kissinger was on their board of directors and it was clear that running away fast was the only option.
Oh come on. Kissinger has been on the board of director of American Express for decades. Should everyone run away from that? When he joined the company stock was around $4 (split adjusted) now it’s around $100. One of the safest companies in the US? I would say. He’s also been on the board of ContiGroup, an international infrastructure company that does well over $10B a year around the world (and yes, could be a CIA front cover, among actually doing infrastructure. He’s also been on the board of MMoA and other non-profits, including some affiliated with the Olympics and others.
I have no particular love for Kissinger, his Vietnam policy actually killed a couple of my friends, but he has also done honorable things, even good things, including in international arenas across his long life.
Perhaps you don’t know how a board works? Not everybody is there to peer through the green eyeshades and tote up the profits, or even to know how the technology works, necessarily. Kissinger was doubtless there for the contacts he could provide: “Hello, Mr. Walgreen’s CEO? I’m Henry Kissinger and I think you should take a meeting with Liz Holmes, our CEO at Theranos, who may have something that could seriously change the game for your company…” I say this because I served on boards of some non-profits when I ran a station in Chicago, and I (at least) understood that they had not invited me in because of my brilliance in accounting or even knowing how a Museum worked, I was there because I could round up my pals at other stations and help publicize the fund raising events with PSAs to the public without spending any of their hard-won grant money. Kissinger was there because his name on the masthead offered a Rolodex of worldwide contacts.
Yes, shame on him for not knowing it was a fraud, but then Theranos managed to fool nearly everyone including the sharpies at the Wall Street Journal, the board at Walgreen’s, and the entire medical testing community, at least for some time, so I’m willing to cut Henry some slack for not knowing the intricacies of how blood tests work.
I don’t forgive him for Vietnam. For Theranos? Eh, he got duped, like thousands of others./ Holmes? Could be pathological, or could just be that she started breathing her own oxygen and got caught up in the hype and didn’t know which way to run after the technology didn’t work out. I lean towards pathological, given the timelines and the scope of the failure, but I haven’t read the book (yet) so I don’t know.