> In the past year and a half, the grandson and grandfather have rarely spoken or seen one another, communicating mainly through lawyers, says Tyler Shultz. He and his parents have spent more than $400,000 on legal fees, he says. He didn’t attend his grandfather’s 95th birthday celebration in December. Ms. Holmes did.
> “Fraud is not a trade secret,” says Mr. Shultz, who hoped his grandfather would cut ties with Theranos once the company’s practices became known. “I refuse to allow bullying, intimidation and threat of legal action to take away my First Amendment right to speak out against wrongdoing.”
> what the hell is wrong with Theranos that they seemed so focused on attacking anyone who questions them, rather than focusing on actually fixing the problem
The problem is unfixable because it's a complete fraud. There is nothing. They're holding the fort for as long as possible, and it's amazing they've been able to hold it for so long.
Off topic: he's 95 years old?! I don't care how well connected he is, who thought it would be a good idea to have a nonagenarian on the board of a (supposedly) cutting edge health-tech company?!
Such individuals are often chosen to be on the board for their experience and networking prowess.
It's quite true that testing their mental faculty would be a challenge. Therefore the decision could simply lie with other board members based on their observations of his behaviour and the direct contributions he makes to the company.
To suggest that mental acuity is uniformly distributed with respect to age seems a bit "post-truth". The priors at play most definetly suggest much greater scrutiny of a 95 year old, but by no means should they be preclusive.
For the same reason an auto insurance company charges my 86 year old grandmother thousands of dollars per year more than myself; your faculties degrade with age.
I remember in the 90s being a teenager reading Boies brilliant work shredding the Microsoft monopoly with such overwhelming skill, and he was almost a hero of mine. Since then I've realized he's just a hired gun, a genius with no morals or integrity who's in it for the money and nothing else. What a disappointment.
If you only want lawyers to take cases on popular sides you're going to be disappointed. And, in fact, I'd argue that you're effectively arguing that only popular opinion should have good representation--which is pretty much at cross-purposes with the function of the judicial system.
