When asked how that had affected her work at Theranos, Ms. Holmes said it was difficult to separate where his influence began and ended. In legal filings before the trial, Mr. Balwani strongly denied allegations of abuse.

But Ms. Holmes also acknowledged making mistakes. She said she regretted adding the logos of pharmaceutical companies to validation reports that she had sent out to investors, which led them to believe that the drug companies had endorsed Theranos’s technology. She said she also regretted the way she had handled a Wall Street Journal exposé with private investigators and legal attacks on former employees who had spoken to the journalist. And she said she had allowed incorrect information to be disseminated in a positive Fortune cover article about her.

Ms. Holmes concluded a portion of her testimony with a speech about her intentions in pitching Theranos to investors, patients and the press.

“I wanted to convey the impact,” she said. “I wanted to talk about what this company could do a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. They weren’t interested in today or tomorrow or next month — they were interested in what kind of change we could make.”

It was all meant to support the defense’s main argument, as outlined in opening statements in September. Ms. Holmes, her lawyers said, made mistakes. But her mistakes were not a crime. She was naïve and ambitious, they argued, but never meant to deceive.

“Theranos didn’t see mistakes as crimes. They saw them as part of the path to success,” Lance Wade, one of Ms. Holmes’s lawyers, said in his opening statement.

In their cross-examination, prosecutors sought to dismantle Ms. Holmes’s excuses. They noted that Theranos had shared plenty of other trade secrets with its partners, which signed nondisclosure agreements. Mr. Leach pointed out times when Ms. Holmes allowed false or misleading information about Theranos to spread to investors and patients.

Earlier in the trial, during testimony from 29 witnesses called by prosecutors, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers sought to poke holes and create confusion around the facts of the case. They attacked the credibility of investors, trying to show that they should have done better research on Theranos before investing to understand the risks and the details of its business. And they tried to argue that patients who testified that they had received troubling blood test results from Theranos were not qualified to interpret them.

Erin Woo contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/technology/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial-defense.html

Ms. Holmes mostly appeared collected on Tuesday, though her face sometimes clouded over with frustration or concern. But she broke into a wide smile when delivering answers to Mr. Leach such as “I’m not sure, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.” She also smiled while correcting him when he misspoke, saying “billion” instead of “million.”

Prosecutors Take Aim

Under cross-examination, Ms. Holmes sometimes admitted to mistakes. Her handling of The Journal’s investigation into Theranos’s claims, she said, was a “disaster.”

“We totally messed it up,” she said.

Ms. Holmes also conceded, after prodding, that whistle-blowers including the former Theranos employees Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung were right when they spoke up about problems in the start-up’s lab.

In other instances, Ms. Holmes pushed back, blaming a desire to protect Theranos’s trade secrets for her actions. She said she had not tried to “intimidate” John Carreyrou, the Journal reporter who exposed the company’s flaws, or Ms. Cheung and Mr. Shultz, who were sources for Mr. Carreyrou.

“We wanted to make sure our trade secrets weren’t disclosed,” she said.

In many cases, Ms. Holmes said, she simply didn’t remember. She didn’t recall joking about Mr. Carreyrou’s heritage, how many tests Theranos had run at the time of his article or what her salary was. Mr. Leach, the prosecutor, frequently pulled up text messages and emails to refresh her memory.

Abuse Accusations

Ms. Holmes closed her direct testimony with bombshell accusations of abuse against Ramesh Balwani, her boyfriend of more than a decade, who worked at Theranos and was indicted as a co-conspirator in fraud. Mr. Balwani, who goes by Sunny, was emotionally and physically abusive, she said.

Mr. Balwani frequently criticized her and controlled what she ate and her schedule, Ms. Holmes said. He kept her from members of her family because they were a distraction. And he told her to “kill” her old self to be reborn as a new, successful entrepreneur.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/article/elizabeth-holmes-trial-testimony.html

Ms. Holmes tried tying her relationship with Mr. Balwani to her fraud charges by stating that he impacted “everything about who I was,” including Theranos. She said she pushed him out of the company and broke up with him after she learned that Theranos’s lab, which Mr. Balwani oversaw, had major issues.

“There was no way I could save our company if he was there,” she said on Tuesday.

Mr. Balwani has denied assault accusations. He was indicted on fraud charges alongside Ms. Holmes and will be tried separately next year. He has also pleaded not guilty.

Over a long and detailed day of testimony, Mr. Leach lingered on the relationship, using text messages between Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani as evidence. He asked Ms. Holmes to read text messages that showed her exchanging affectionate remarks with Mr. Balwani. The pair called each other “tiger” and “tigress” in between pep talks about building Theranos.

“No one but you and I can build this business,” Mr. Balwani wrote in one exchange.

After each, Mr. Leach asked Ms. Holmes to verify that she had just read an example of Mr. Balwani acting lovingly toward her. Reading the messages, Ms. Holmes cried for a second time on the stand.

Jill Hasday, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has written a book on intimate partner violence and the law, said the prosecution’s tactic could work to undermine Ms. Holmes’s previous testimony, depending on jurors’ understanding of abuse.

“My gut is, it can be effective, because people have a lot of misconceptions about intimate partner violence, among other things that it’s constant,” Ms. Hasday said.

The trial, which is scheduled to end in December, resumes next week.

Erin Woo contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/technology/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial-prosecution.html

Where will that electricity get produced? Solar power could be produced on largely unpopulated land masses and transported to population centers, an idea Elon Musk raised about China five years ago. China has “an enormous land area, much of which is hardly occupied at all,” he said, noting that most of China’s population is concentrated in coastal cities. “So you could easily power all of China with solar.”

Another trend that, like increasing energy needs, isn’t new and isn’t going away: on-demand everything. Technology has led us to expect that goods and services will be delivered at the push of a button, often within minutes. That could transform real estate, especially space in cities that is currently used for retail. As companies work toward instant deliveries, they’ll need to warehouse items closer and closer to customers. Real estate investors are already contemplating how to create mini-warehouses on every block. And the density of people in cities is likely to affect the farming and delivery of food. To get fresh produce to customers quickly, vertical farming — in indoor, controlled environments — could move from being the dream of some start-ups to a new reality.

And we’ll be older. In the United States, we’re likely to live until 82.4 years old, compared with the current life expectancy of 79.1 years, the United Nations forecasts. That’s a good thing and for health care companies and others that cater to older people. But living three extra years is going to be more expensive, which will have implications for both working and saving. According to the Urban Institute, government “projections indicate that there will be 2.1 workers per Social Security beneficiary in 2040, down from 3.7 in 1970.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/business/dealbook/future-society-demographics.html

There were photos of the liberation of the camp, which was really inspiring, to see these American guys who had fought across Europe and managed to save these survivors. That moment taught me about good and evil.

Was that part of the reason you joined the Marines?

I think it inspired me as a young boy to think about serving in the military. I would speak to recruiters who came to the cafeteria, and I began my applications to the military academies. And then I hit a growth spurt and became good at football.

I started getting recruited my junior year of high school, and I narrowed down my top choices to Stanford and Wisconsin. And the moment I stepped on campus at Wisconsin, the program resonated with me. These guys, they work hard. The culture there was incredible. And at Stanford, the coach was like a Zen Buddhist. The offensive line coach didn’t believe in yelling at players. I’m like, “How do you coach like that?”

I don’t know many people who turned down Stanford for Wisconsin.

I’ve never been a believer in pedigree, and it’s something that I say all the time when I’m recruiting people. If you went to Stanford, that’s cool. I don’t have anything against you. But you’re not going to get a leg up with me based off of your pedigree.

You eventually joined the military, though.

9/11 happened my freshman year. I was getting breakfast before going to the stadium for practice, and I immediately thought, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right place?” As I sat there I get the call from my dad, and he says to me, “Don’t think about it. You are not dropping out and enlisting.” He knew what was going through my head.

I didn’t for the next four years, but I maintained an intense interest in what was happening, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Then Pat Tillman was killed right before my senior year, and I said, “Enough is enough.” I played my last game on Jan. 1, 2005, and enlisted within a month.

What did the training you received from the military give you that you didn’t already have before you went over there?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/business/jake-wood-team-rubicon-groundswell-corner-office.html

Now as Ms. Holmes, 37, stands trial, the media’s role in Theranos’s rise and fall has been laid out in painstaking detail. Ms. Holmes used positive articles like Fortune’s to gain credibility with investors, who poured $945 million into Theranos, prosecutors have argued.

Those investors were often wowed by the media coverage. Chris Lucas, a venture capitalist whose firm had invested in Theranos, testified that reading the Fortune article had made him “very proud of the situation, proud we were involved, very proud of Elizabeth, the whole thing.” Lisa Peterson, who managed a $100 million investment in Theranos on behalf of the wealthy DeVos family, lifted language directly from the Fortune article into a report she prepared.

The media was likewise eager to embrace Ms. Holmes’s narrative of a brilliant Stanford University dropout on her way to becoming the next Steve Jobs. Here was a young, self-made female billionaire who was being compared to Einstein and Beethoven. She embraced iconography, dressing like Mr. Jobs in black turtlenecks, as well as an esoteric lifestyle, telling Mr. Parloff that she was a vegan Buddhist who eschewed coffee for green juice.

“There was a hunger for that kind of story, and she seized that opportunity and worked that very carefully,” Ms. O’Mara said.

The media’s fascination with Ms. Holmes became so intense that in 2015, her business partner and boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, who is known as Sunny, warned her that the hype was getting risky.

“FYI, I am worried about over exposure without solid substance, which is lacking right now,” Mr. Balwani wrote in a text message that was included in court filings.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/technology/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial.html

It was then, during a slump in cryptocurrency prices, that Mr. Marszalek decided to rebrand Monaco. He contacted Matt Blaze, a cryptography professor then at the University of Pennsylvania, who had owned the crypto.com domain name for 25 years. During that time, Mr. Blaze had refused to part with the web address and had publicly disdained the new digital gold rush.

But this time, Mr. Blaze couldn’t resist. In a July 2018 blog post, he wrote that he had “gotten a growing barrage of offers, many of which were obviously nonserious, but a few of which were, frankly, attention-getting, for the crypto.com domain.” He said he had “shrugged most of them off, but it became increasingly clear that holding on to the domain was making less and less sense for me.”

Mr. Blaze, now a professor at Georgetown University, declined to comment. In a Zoom interview from a stark white room in Hong Kong, Mr. Marszalek also declined to discuss what he paid for the Crypto.com domain name, but pointed to an article on the tech site The Verge that suggested the address could be worth millions.

In an interview, Mr. Marszalek, 42, a Polish-born entrepreneur, said Crypto.com and its parent company, Foris Technology, had their headquarters in Singapore. Crypto.com’s trading app, which allows people to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ether and 150 other digital currencies, makes money by taking a fee on transactions. Mr. Marszalek said the company was profitable but did not provide exact figures.

“As with all cryptocurrency businesses this year, the market has been phenomenal,” he said. He added that Crypto.com’s revenue between April and June was about a quarter of that of Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, which generated $2.2 billion in revenue in that period.

Crypto.com is only the ninth-largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily volume, according to CoinMarketCap, a site that tracks cryptocurrency trading and prices. Yet the bull market has allowed the company to fund an eye-popping marketing push.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/technology/crypto-staples-center-la.html

“They assumed I had cash, too,” said Mr. Chobanian. He didn’t. He knew he was supposed to show up at the police station and buy back his equipment. Instead, he wrote an impassioned essay on his lawyer’s computer, posted on Facebook, describing the ordeal.

“I woke up the next morning a superstar,” he says. “I was on five or six talk shows, including the top-rated political show in the country.”

Penny ante corruption, like traffic cop bribes, have all but vanished, and since 2012 the country has improved its results in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index. A free-for-all mentality, on the other hand, endures. Ukraine is cracking down on fake Covid-19 vaccination certificates and nobody seems very bothered that the mayor of Kyiv, the former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, lives above a strip club known as a place to meet prostitutes. (Whether the mayor owns Rio, as the club is called, is unclear. Though it does seem to operate under its own rules; a group of entrepreneurs singled out Mr. Klitschko in an April protest in front of City Hall, complaining that Rio was open during the pandemic while other businesses were forced to close.)

During a walking tour of Kyiv, Mr. Chobanian talked about politicians on the take and construction projects that audacious developers just started building, skirting zoning laws and licenses. He related these facts with a rueful sense that something was terribly broken about Ukraine. That said, those defects allow him to run his company with no oversight. What makes this country ideal for Kuna — a weak government, a dearth of guardrails — is a national tragedy for the wider population.

For now, the government knows nothing about the size, revenue or structure of his company, including staffing figures. When a woman brings him tea during our interview, he describes her as an “entrepreneur,” which, he explains, is why he doesn’t pay her a salary.

“Right now, there is no government in my business,” he said. “None.”

‘You need to have lawyers’

Ukraine has suffered through too many financial scandals to expect a major influx of executives from large, international investment banks, with or without inducements. But then along came crypto, which has reputational woes of its own. Maybe this is a perfect match.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/business/crypto-ukraine.html

Most of the proprietors are in their 20s or 30s, and all of their businesses opened within the last few years. “After the war began, many young Yemeni-American merchants felt like they needed to help shine a light on Yemen,” Debbie Almontaser, a prominent Yemeni activist and educator from Brooklyn, said. “The best and most informative way is through coffee, our contribution to civilization dating back hundreds of years.”

The coffee plant, Coffea arabica, first bloomed in the highlands of Ethiopia, but by the 15th century, according to early European and Arab sources, it had crossed the Bab-el-Mandeb strait to Yemen, where Sufi monks transmuted the plant’s red cherries into the drink we know today. Traders spread the pips, or “beans,” throughout the Ottoman Empire and beyond, introducing them to Istanbul and Cairo, and then to Vienna and Venice and Paris.

Those bitter seeds made Yemen rich, but by the 18th century, Europeans had begun smuggling them out of the country, transporting them to colonies like Martinique and Java, where workers were forced to grow them on plantations for little or no pay. Cheap coffee flooded the market, and the Yemen coffee trade withered. By 1800, Yemen accounted for just 6 percent of the global product.

What didn’t wither was Yemen’s entrepreneurial spirit. “One thing I love about my people is that they’re determined,” said Ms. Almontaser, who helped establish a trade organization called the Yemeni American Merchants Association in 2017, a direct response to President Donald J. Trump’s crackdown on Muslim immigrants. “They come to the United States, not speaking a word of English, and put themselves in a bodega, and apprentice themselves for a minimum wage salary, and learn the business, and save their money, and start a business of their own.”

Like caffeine, she said, “entrepreneurialism is in our blood.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/nyregion/yemen-coffee-brooklyn.html

SAN JOSE, Calif. — In 2014, Dan Mosley, a lawyer and power broker among wealthy families, asked the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes for audited financial statements of Theranos, her blood testing start-up. Theranos never produced any, but Mr. Mosley invested $6 million in the company anyway — and wrote Ms. Holmes a gushing thank-you email for the opportunity.

Bryan Tolbert, an investor at Hall Group, said his firm invested $5 million in Theranos in 2013, even though it did not have a detailed grasp of the start-up’s technologies or its work with pharmaceutical companies and the military.

And Lisa Peterson, who handles investments for Michigan’s wealthy DeVos family, said she did not visit any of Theranos’s testing centers in Walgreens stores, call any Walgreens executives or hire any outside experts in science, regulations or legal matters to verify the start-up’s claims. In 2014, the DeVos family invested $100 million into the company.

The humiliating details of bad investments like Theranos are rarely displayed so prominently to the public. But they have been laid bare in recent weeks at the trial of Ms. Holmes, 37, who faces a dozen counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud; she has pleaded not guilty. She and Theranos fell from grace — with investor money evaporating and the company shutting down in 2018 — after claims about its blood-testing technology were shown to be false.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/technology/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-investors-diligence.html