How many fraudulent companies do you think there are?
Given the whole Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos thing, how many other fraudulent companies (probably on a smaller scale) do you think there are?
I mean Theranos existed for almost two decades. Holmes basically lied about being able to do all these tests and given the caliber of investors she got, I’d say it went on for a long time.
So, how many companies do you think are out there that lie about what they do and are total bs?
If you mean fraudulent like full scale Enron, I think that almost no public companies can do anything like that nowadays. VC/backed private companies that are overselling themselfs, I would guess that almost everyone of them. Does anyone here worked at a VC Backed company that not stretched their numbers/story? I do not think that they are as bad as Theranos tough.
I’ll echo what the other people said. In terms of outright fabrication of product ideas, I doubt there are many that are as brazen as Holmes, especially at such scale. That’s not a really measurable parameter because people are trying to trick you and anyone who wanted to measure that would sometimes be fooled.
As far as Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay levels of accounting fraud, that’s largely in the past. SarBox has hit hard. The numbers of public companies have gone down enormously. For context, you have to remember that the Feds and the DOJ detonated Arthur Andersen, which basically nuked the accounting industry and scattered those people everywhere. I think they overdid it, but the message was clear: lie and shred your files, and we will destroy not only your Houston office— we will rip every office you have to tatters. That fear still lives within the Big 4 today.
As far as accounting and valuation frauds, I think they’re most likely to live in 3 unregulated or little-regulated areas:
1. VC-backed firms that try to play hot potato to get the next Series of funding.
2. PE funds that add back EBITDA to high heaven on cruddy portcos to convince their investors that Fund II and III are a good idea.
3. In the public markets, SPACs don’t require all of the typical disclosures, which is awesome. But awesome has two meanings here. It’s surfer bro awesome in the sense that you can bring a company to market at a lower cost than an IPO (don’t bring up that promote BS, it’s still cheaper, I know). It’s awesome in an awe/fear sense because people can dump garbage like HOFV and the EV companies on the market.
Just my take. Cheers
Although there is probably some fraud out there, in the grand scheme of things the problem of fraud is insignificant compared to the magnitude of dot com bubble two Quran hai Tu. Investors giving 10s of billions to a company like Uber that will never make money and has a hyper overvaluation is a simple example of which there are thousands more. Gigantic amounts of public and private investor funds will eventually be incinerated when the market becomes a weighing machine.
What's Quran hai Tu?
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