The Rise and Fall of Elizabeth Holmes: A Silicon Valley Tragicomedy in 6 Trivia Facts

Elon Musk values Twitter at $20 billion, according to an internal memo reported by the Information on March 25, 2023. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022, meaning Twitter lost more than half its value in just half a year. However, Musk acknowledged it as an overpayment at the time of the deal. The company’s value dropped throughout the year as advertisers pulled out of the platform.

Before its collapse in Nov. 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion and the third-largest exchange in volume. CoinDesk reported that FTX was lending its token FTT to Alameda Research, which FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried owns. FTX experienced a bank run after the story sparked mass withdrawals. On Dec. 12, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the US government. Bankman-Fried’s arrest came just a day before he was due to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee.

In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried instructed those working for him to pay a bribe of $40 million to one or more Chinese officials to help unfreeze trading accounts maintained by FTX’s sister company, Alameda Research, that held up to $1 billion in cryptocurrencies. Bankman-Fried was charged with 13 criminal counts, including foreign bribery, on March 28, 2023.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the once-billionaire founder of FTX, couldn’t resist the urge to give a couple of witnesses in his upcoming trial a friendly ‘nudge’ (or, as the court calls it, “witness tampering”). The judge revoked his bail, leading to his imprisonment, in a hearing on August 11, 2023. He is suspected of sharing his ex-partner Caroline Ellison’s private writings with a New York Times reporter and contacting FTX’s general counsel with encrypted messages. Bankman-Fried faces charges of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund, where Caroline Ellison was CEO. Ellison has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against him at his trial on October 2.

Changpeng Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Binance, which he launched in 2017 after raising $15 million through an initial coin offering. Binance offers various services to crypto enthusiasts, such as trading, stakes, lending, mining, and launching new tokens. In March 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Binance and Zhao in Illinois, claiming they breached derivatives rules and operated a “web of deception.” On June 5, 2023, the SEC joined the legal attack with 13 charges against Binance and Zhao. The SEC said Binance had mixed “billions of dollars” in customer funds and secretly sent them to a separate company controlled by Zhao. Zhao has vowed to defend his platform vigorously and said Binance is not a US exchange.

The Binance Trial’s Result

By Nov. 21, Zhao pleaded guilty to Violating Money Laundering Rules. He will pay a $50 million fine and step down as CEO. Binance had agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines as part of a guilty plea.

Holmes was the founder and CEO of Theranos, a startup that raised nearly $1 billion from investors and became a Silicon Valley sensation. However, The Wall Street Journal exposed her technology as flawed and dangerous in 2015. She was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022 and sentenced to 11 years in prison in May 2023. She was incarcerated on May 30, 2023, in a women’s prison camp in Texas.

Washington Mutual, or WaMu, was a savings and loan association that collapsed in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis. It had $307 billion in assets and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for a bargain price of $1.9 billion. The bank’s failure was the largest in US history, surpassing the previous record by Continental Illinois in 1984.

What happened to Silicon Valley Bank?

Silicon Valley Bank was the second-largest failure in US history, with $209 billion in assets. Its collapse was triggered by a bank run and a downgrade in its credit rating. The bank’s customers, mostly tech companies and wealthy individuals, withdrew $42 billion in one day on March 10, 2023, leaving the bank with a negative cash balance. Starting March 13, 2023, SVB’s depositors were able to access their funds as The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve stepped in. Assuming SVB’s liabilities, HSBC agreed to take over and buy the UK arm of the bank for one pound. Signature Bank, a New York-based regional bank, shuttered suddenly on March 12, marking the third-biggest bank failure in US history.

First Citizens Bank is a family-owned bank founded in 1898 by Frank Holding Sr. and his family. It has become the largest family-owned bank in the US, with over 500 branches in 19 states. On March 26, 2023, the bank purchased all deposits and loans from Silicon Valley Bridge Bank. This was the financial institution whose collapse in March 2023 was the second-largest in US history and set off a chain reaction that caused the third-biggest bank-fail.

Regulators seized troubled First Republic Bank Monday, May 1, 2023, and sold its deposits and most of its assets to JPMorgan Chase Bank. With $229 billion in assets, First Republic Bank became the second-largest bank failure in US history. It surpasses Silicon Valley Bank, which failed on March 10, 2023. Both banks were acquired by JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, which has previously acquired failed banks such as Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns during the 2008 financial crisis. Get more news trivia facts on the First Republic Bank failure here.

Soros Fund Management, Fortress Investment Group, and Monroe Capital formed a lender consortium to provide about $225 million in a credit bid. The bankruptcy filing was announced on May 15, 2023, as Vice Media Group faced financial difficulties and top-executive departures. Vice Media Group is known for its websites, such as Vice, Refinery29, i-D, and Motherboard, and its TV program “Vice News Tonight,” which was canceled in April 2023.

Factcheck: Billionaire George Soros said he is “alive and healthy” on May 15, 2023, after viral posts on social media falsely claimed he had a fatal heart attack a day earlier. Soros, 92, has been a frequent target of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, personal attacks by Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, and endless “death” hoaxes.

Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Apr. 23, 2023. The company announced it would stop accepting coupons on Apr. 26, 2023, when store-closing sales began. The announcement came after failing to secure funding and facing years of dreary sales and losses.

ShopRite is a grocery store and supermarket chain. CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid are the go-to spots for prescription and over-the-counter meds. On Oct. 16, 2023, Rite Aid, the third-largest US drugstore chain, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to declining profits from prescription drug sales. It also faced increased competition from Amazon, big-box stores, and others, not to mention 1,600 lawsuits related to its role in the opioid crisis. Rite Aid is expected to close 400 to 500 of its approximately 2,200 stores after already closing 200 stores. CVS and Walgreens, other major drugstore chains, have also closed stores in recent years.

After the dramatic boardroom shuffle at OpenAI, which saw Sam Altman ousted from his CEO throne on Nov. 17, 2023, he didn’t have to wander the tech wilderness for long. While Microsoft swiftly announced they scooped up Altman and his comrade-in-AI, Greg Brockman, by Nov. 22, Altman was back at OpenAI’s CEO seat.

M&M announced on Jan. 23, 2023, that they would take “an indefinite pause” from their “spokescandies” as they felt they were too divisive for a polarized country. Maya Rudolph is the new spokesperson for the brand.

How are the cartoon candies divisive?

Recently, M&M changed its characters’ shoes, replacing their green M&M heels with flats and swapping their brown M&M stilettos for smaller, more comfortable ones. Mars Wrigley also introduced a purple M&M in Sept. 2022, “celebrating women across the country who are flipping the status quo,” and figures on the right criticized it as “Woke M&M’s.”

Unpaid Reddit moderators on strike, blocking users and advertisers, chose to post only images of comedian John Oliver as a symbol of protest. The strike started on June 14, 2023, and affected over 9,000 subreddits. This is after Reddit announced that it would start charging fees to some third-party developers from July 1, 2023, as part of its plan to go public later in 2023. This angered many moderators who use third-party apps to access Reddit’s data and perform tasks unavailable on the official app (such as content moderation). Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman refused to negotiate with the protesters.

When Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, tweeted his agreement with a controversial statement accusing Jewish people of “hating white people” in November 2023, major companies like IBM, Apple, Lionsgate, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Warner Bros Discovery, and The Walt Disney Company announced they have stopped advertising on the platform. Soon after, X announced it was suing Media Matters, an organization monitoring hate speech in social media, for defamation.

Apple, the tech giant from Cupertino, California, recently faced a heated situation with its iPhone 15 models. Users around the globe reported that their shiny Apple iPhones were getting too warm for comfort. Apple found that a software bug and some popular apps like Instagram and Uber caused the devices to run hotter than a summer day in the desert. On Sept. 30, 2023, Apple announced that they’re working on an update to the iOS 17 system to cool things down.

Former US President Donald Trump received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith, dated July 2023. The letter indicates that Trump is under investigation for his role in the January 6 Capitol riots. The letter cites three potential charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding, and violation of section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights. These charges relate to various instances of Trump pressuring officials, including his former vice president Mike Pence, and his efforts to obstruct power transfer.

Rupert Murdoch testified under oath that some of his Fox News hosts knowingly endorsed the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. According to legal documents revealed on Feb. 27, 2023, he said he could have ordered them to stop but didn’t. He also said that, in hindsight, he wished they had been stronger in denouncing the fraud claims. This admission was part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes voting machines and software. Dominion claims that Fox News defamed it by airing false allegations that its machines were rigged to favor Joe Biden over Trump.

Fox News acknowledged that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were false as part of the settlement agreement reached on April 18, 2023. This was shortly before a trial was set to begin in Delaware Superior Court, sparing Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch a court visit. Dominion sued Fox News in 2021 for $1.6 billion, alleging that the network defamed it by broadcasting baseless allegations from former President Trump and his allies. Despite privately expressing skepticism and ridicule about the claims, Fox hosts repeatedly argued on air that Dominion was tied to the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, paid kickbacks to politicians, and flipped millions of votes from Trump to Biden. Fox News said it hoped the settlement would allow the country to move forward from the issues. Dominion said it represented “vindication and accountability.” Fox News did not apologize.

Tucker Carlson’s last show on Fox News aired on Friday, April 21, 2023. He ended the show by telling his viewers: “We’ll see you Monday; in the meantime, have the best weekend.” He did not know it would be his final show on Fox News.

Fun Fact: Carlson posted a video on Twitter on April 26, 2023, speaking publicly for the first time since his firing. He did not address his exit from Fox but railed against “completely irrelevant” debates on TV and “the liars who have been trying to silence” him. Get all the amazing Tucker Carlson Fox News exit trivia facts here.

Kanye West claimed he liked Jewish people again after watching Jonah Hill’s acting in the 2012 film “21 Jump Street,” in an Instagram post accompanied by a photo of the movie poster. He added, “No one should take anger against one or two individuals and transform that into hatred towards millions of innocent people… Thank you, Jonah Hill, I love you.” West had previously made multiple anti-Semitic remarks, leading to him being temporarily removed from social media and losing multiple business deals. He returned to Instagram on March 25, 2023.