23andMe's CEO Anne Wojcicki Is A Liar & So Are A Bunch of Other Silicon Valley Health Tech Companies
We need serious government regulation and overhaul of Ancestry and 23andMe and health tech generally
Greetings new subscribers! If you’d like me to do more of this sort of thing please let me know by getting still others to sign up. Oh yes, it’s risky to write this stuff. But there is no reward without risk and courage is its own reward. Duty, courage, sacrifice. These are the things that increasingly motivate me. I also have a day job so sorry if I got typos. There’s a lot going on here and a lot of it has to be written obliquely. I apologize for that but I’m working on being freer. Careful readers will be rewarded. This, I promise.
The TLDR? Many of the companies doing health tech are Chinese, Israeli/UAE, Russian ops designed to destroy our insane health care system. Moving forward we should closely integrate with the countries most like us — Britain and Australia — and then expand to our minority population. A lot of our health care problems could be solved with single payer.
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki lied about her relationship with disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in a recent interview with Kara Swisher, now of the New York Times.
In an interview that was published this past week Wojcicki claimed that she was onto Holmes way back when.
That’s pretty crazy. Why didn’t she tell anyone? Probably for the same reason that she won’t name the frauds today. These people they protect one another, especially if its the sisterhood of the traveling lab coat. Just like the mafia. Omertà is the way.
But is that Holmes denial stuff, you know, true? And if it is why was Wojcicki planning to be on stage with Holmes right after the news aired?
I checked in on an interview she did in 2016 with Vox. And … Wojcicki’s lying about being onto Holmes. Or at least she didn’t let all of us know about it even after the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyou broke the story. Tsk, tsk!
Rather hilariously Wojcicki is lying about the Holmes relationship with the very same Kara Swisher! Do these people not have Google? It was only five years ago…
“I love what they’re trying to do. I know Elizabeth well,” she said to Swisher in April 2016. “I have a ton of respect for them there.”
“I’m cheering for Theranos to succeed because it’ll help the industry,” she continued. Spoiler alert: it didn’t!
Now to be fair to Wojcicki she said in 2016 that she hadn’t seen “the data” yet. But still Wojcicki understood why Holmes didn’t because trade secrets or something. OK, fine!
There was no reflection on how fame culture might have done Elizabeth in. Or how Theranos, 23AndMe, and a host of other tech companies have elected to fight with the regulators rather than work alongside them. When an app fails to work people can relaunch it but when your health is compromised, well, it isn’t so easy.
Wojcicki, like Holmes, also sought the limelight. The limelight isn’t always the best place for would be lab rats. The best ones tend to scurry when its cast upon them rather than bask in it. This is a way you can tell if someone is a fraud. How much do they love their own press? With Elizabeth it was a lot. And with Anne? Well she dated A-Rod didn’t she? And he wouldn’t lie to us at all, now would he? (Yankees still suck!)
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In my experience real scientists are too busy doing the work to be seen to be doing it. That goes double for inventors. These are deeply introverted people. They like to build and struggle with promoting. They are attached to their creations and see them almost as if they were their children.
Everybody wants to be a public intellectual but nobody actually educates the public. Why do that? Why lose your edge? No, they want to be adored by the public. It isn’t enough for these types to let the work speak for itself. It has to be made beautiful, glammed up.
Scientists are a vain sort and I’d wager that they are more vain than the average citizen. It’s a world of prizes and prizes stoke ego. You can see how a scientist could be easily compromised by Chinese intelligence and how a scientific bureaucrat might fall for their flattery and promises of still more funding. But enough about Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak! Just read The Intercept! (Do you still believe that The Intercept, funded by Pierre Omidyar of eBay fame, has no intelligence ties?)
What Was Theranos Really About? It Was a Russian Data Ploy — Not Unlike Cambridge Analytica and the Arizona Recount.
This combination of marketing mixed with hype mixed with lack of attention to regulation can be a particularly dangerous combination, as we are finding out in the Theranos trial.
We’ve seen a lot of fraud lately, especially in health care and especially in Silicon Valley where the promise of a health panacea never quite seems to materialize even after all the money that’s blown right before the investors and entrepreneurs decamp to Miami or Austin or SPAC it. (These California refugees move there not because of the taxes, no! It’s because California, they say, is dysfunctional! Oh really? And who is to blame for that? Could it be all that money coming in and pushing up real estate prices?)
Jim Chanos tells the FT that we are in a golden age of fraud. I agree. The biggest frauds are in Silicon Valley and they have it down to an art form. It seems to follow a similar program even, as if it’s an intergenerational op running through time and space.
Find a young person who you can stand up as the construct. Young, dumb, ambitious, credulous. It helps if they are a minority or a woman or a foreigner or a child. If anyone criticizes your construct your friends in the media can call them racist or sexist or xenophobic or ageist. If the questions persist call the person making the accusations a “conspiracy” theorist. Be sure to use plenty of connections in the so-called free press to smear anyone who begins asking questions as a nut, or a Holocaust denier, or a pedophile or worse. Kill the critic’s career. Find dirt out on them! And, if you can get away with it, kill them. Or get them to kill themselves.
When all melts down blame the construct and accept no responsibility! Onto the next! After all, the best constructs are those who don’t even know they are constructs. They can be the most believable because they believe their own nonsense. Indeed that’s what might even make them compelling. This thread is everything you ever wanted to know about how persuasive Elizabeth Holmes could be. I recommend perusing it closely.
Stagecraft is statecraft and when you are looking for a construct to construct it is a form of casting a play. Elizabeth Holmes is a perfect patsy. The literal translation of her name from Hebrew and Middle English is “Oath Island.” Why she’s just like Sherlock Holmes searching for truth, you guys! She appeals to Americana and her device — The Edison — is a nod to the greatest of American investors. It doesn’t work, of course, and was an insult to Edison’s memory. Maybe that’s the point… Did I mention SoftBank connected company went and bought all of Theranos’s patents?
The Russians love compromising the most American of things — the National Rifle Association, Young Americans for Liberty, and indeed the anti-Communist movement itself. Why was Joe McCarthy, that most midwestern of anti-communists, palling around with Roy Cohn anyway?
If you look closer at her pedigree — her blood line! — things start to get both very interesting and very weird very quickly. Holmes was raised in Washington DC suburbs, a creature of the so-called deep state.
She has a family history that works for the scam too. Her father worked for Enron and she has another relative who was involved in a medical scam and still another one who was working in Iran during the rule of the Shah.
Never forget that Enron was very connected to the Russians. So, too, is Tim Draper, her first investor.
In my analysis she works for the Russians and the neocons who are rather revealingly more aligned than either would have you know. Robert Mueller worked on the Enron scandal, too, per The New York Times.
Many of the companies you know and love are in fact intelligence operations masquerading as firms. The founders (or their investors or both) are crewed up, as it were. They didn't just wake up one day and decide to execute. They are part of a network, a deep state plan.
There are no monopolies that exist without state approval, either through tacit willingness or through benign neglect. The state either wants you to exist or will eventually shut you down. In some cases you can sell to another company before that happens but more often than not you are either backed from the state from the beginning or you get shutdown rather quickly because you run afoul of something or other.
A well functioning monopoly works in the national interest; a poorly functioning one, like Facebook, is predatory and exploitative. The well functioning, state supported monopolies always destroy the predatory ones eventually.
Sometimes these monopolies are conferred simply because they solve a state need. Netflix, for example, solves the problem of all the money laundering in the mobbed up film industry by technifying the industry and making it all very legible. Netflix may not release its numbers of who watched what when but they know obviously. Many of the movies or shows promoted on Netflix and Amazon Video do seem to promote a certain agenda.
I suspect it has something to do with their foundings. We’ve already noted that Jeff Bezos’s adoptive father and grandfather all had deep state connections. Now what about Netflix? Take a gander at the family histories of Netflix’s two cofounders — Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Hastings served in the Peace Corps while Randolph is a descendant of Edward Bernays, master of propaganda and advertising. Do you think it just sort of happened that Barack Obama one day got a gig working for Netflix?
Napster solved it in the film industry before being executed. Sean Parker, who cofounded Napster, went on to serve on the board of Spotify. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Parker grew up in Herndon, VA and that his father Bruce worked for the very deep state, NOAA? Or how about Chris Sacca’s early stage investment in Uber? Wasn’t Uber useful for taking down the taxicab mob?Billionaires, far from being a policy failure, are a policy design. They are the product of the state taking out the mobbed up industry. America has no titles of nobility but to be anointed a billionaire is a form of knighthood. Your wealth is expected to serve others.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Soros’s Open Society are going through ownership changes. They weren’t the first and won’t be the last.
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The narrative around Theranos is that it didn’t have any tech money in it.
No major Silicon Valley investors, they claim. Not so fast! Yet I seem to recall Marc Andreessen’s wife, Laura, writing fawningly of Ms. Holmes. Tim Draper, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, invested way early. He even has positive things to say about Elizabeth to this day. He’s a big deal. DFJ’s in Tesla and SpaceX! Or do those tech companies only count when you want them to?
Might there be other frauds? Wojcicki won’t name them in her interview with Kara Swisher. Why not? How can we expect the health tech industry to self police if she won’t do the policing?
Let’s do it for her while naming the VCs who back these frauds.
Indeed there are — if you dare look. Most don’t look too closely. And if they do they’ll pretend they knew all along. That’s how it works.
There’s Curative, which is funded by DCVC (which has a lot of Chinese capital and Chinese boosters), which stole $1B from the U.S. taxpayer by billing them for fake Covid tests. That fraud was detected by the L.A. Times.
Curative’s Emergency Use Authorization was rescinded by the FDA but not before Matt Michelsen, who has good ties in the Middle East despite having been a former sun glasses salesman and Lady Gaga friend, bought a sweet McMansion in Austin.
Ask yourself dear reader the following:
Would the Chinese fund a British kid to front for a former sunglasses salesman turned fake covid test salesman?
Did I mention that said former sunglasses salesman Matt Michelsen is also great friends with tax cheat Rebekah Mercer, who funds Russian fronts Parler, Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart “News”? That Michelsen, per The New York Times, sought to broker a deal between Facebook and Mercer after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? That’s weird, right?
You can’t blame the Chinese for thinking: Well we’ve run around pushing fake vaccines and fake personal protective equipment so why not fake tests too?
Next we have a real shitty (ha! ha! get it? it’s a poo testing) company: UBiome.
Its founder, Jessica Richman, is currently on the lam with her cofounder and secret husband Zachary Apte. Seriously.
UBiome was funded by Joe Lonsdale and 8VC, principally. UBiome also raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel-backed Mithril. It also included money from the very Chinese Zhen Fund. Weirdly none of these people ever talk about this failure, despite their very public profiles online. Why is that? What did they learn? They aren’t talking.
Word on the London street is that Lonsdale raising money from the United Arab Emirates. He’s a fan of UAE, telling an interviewer:
the UAE has some very strong, very intelligent rulers there. And they built Dubai with a model that was like this, and then attracted millions of people and created massive wealth, and talk to lots of people in the region about principles they should embrace as well. And it was very, very successful along those lines.
Lonsdale went on at length about the "Singapore of the Middle East” with Jason Calacanis earlier this month. He says he prefers not to make money from “real shady” people. Now that the former president of Afghanistan rolled into
Ah yes, UAE that country which got in trouble for hiring NSA contractors to spy illegally, from where Tom Barack was an unregistered foreign agent, and where Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is suspected of money laundering. With allies like these Emiratis who needs enemies? And we haven’t even begun talking about Richard Clarke’s private spying operation which remains under federal investigation.
Why is a former counterterrorism czar like Clarke working for the UAE anyway? For the same reason Lonsdale is trying to — the UAE has a lot of money, much of it ours by way of Afghanistan corruption.
Brian George writes in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about how the “Kabul to Dubai Pipeline: Lessons Learned From the Kabul Bank Scandal.”
For almost two decades now, billions of dollars in corruption proceeds have been funneled from Afghanistan, a country devastated by four decades of conflict, to Dubai.
Some of that money ended up in venture capital — hundreds of millions, some of which ended up with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC.
True to what Lonsdale’s UAE masters may well want Lonsdale also pushes insane claims about alleged Taliban atrocities. If the US withdraws from Afghanistan where will all that cash be laundered? Not the UAE! And that means the UAE has less money to “invest” in venture funds.
Lonsdale, you may recall, is one of the boosters of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He begged the Wall Street Journal not to publish his relationship but he had no problem asking them for capital. That is, until Jamal Kashoggi was murdered.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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You might ask: Is 23andMe also a problem? I submit to you that it is.
Wojcicki blames the Golden State killer and the Cambridge Analytica scandal for customers’ reluctance to participate in genetic sequencing.
She goes on at length in her 2021 Kara Swisher interview about how she will never work with law enforcement. Why not?
She doesn’t explain why she declines to give 23andMe customers the option to donate their own DNA to help solve crimes. It’s their data, isn’t it? If the coronavirus was such an issue for her company why didn’t she release a genetic coronavirus susceptibility predictor ?
The way Wojcicki treated her cofounders ought to give us pause. She showed them the door. Linda Avey does not have kind things to say.
So, too, are the unanswered questions about her apparent closeness with none other than Jeffrey Epstein, who she dined with in 2011. Wojcicki also claims that she was heavily influenced by Arianna Huffington whose weird Russian ties ought to make us nervous.
Her early investor Esther Dyson, who remains on the 23andMe board, traveled with Epstein and others to Russia. She has longstanding ties to Russia, going back decades. She’s on the board of Yandex, the Russian Google.
What’s the source of Dyson’s funds for investing? Is it the Russian state? Is 23andMe the Russian attempt at genetics?
If it is the Russian state it wouldn’t be that strange. After all Dyson’s father, Freeman Dyson, is on camera admitting his Russophilia. He was very likely a Russian dupe or fellow traveler, if not spy. He was nearly always promoting and supporting the Russian point of view.
Maybe the problem with trusting 23AndMe.com can be found in the chronology of Wojcicki’s and Dyson’s past. I’ve added some notes myself in parentheses. (h/t: Heather Gold)
April 28 1998 Esther Dyson visits Andrei Sakharov’s house in Sarov Russia with Jeffrey Epstein. She posts a photo of the visit to Flickr in 2005. Screencap of same.
Jul 25 2007 Esther Dyson, then an early investor and Board Member of 23andme writes a WSJ column: “I’m one of ten members of Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome project…I believe that the broader spread of this kind of medical and personal information is inevitable.” (Church, like much of Harvard, is thought to be thoroughly compromised by China. Later Church will join the advisory board.)
May 16 2007
Brin and Wojcicki marry at David Copperfields island.May 24 2007 Google invests $3.9 million in 23andme. “Some of that $3.9 million is going to pay back a $2.6 million loan that Brin made to 23andMe.”
Mar 31 2009
Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe holds fashion week party with Ivanka Trump promoting company. NYT reports Wendy Deng and Harvey Weinstein as token investors. (Weng is rumored to be a Chinese spy and you know what happened to Harvey Weinstein.)Jan 3 2011 Brockman holds his annual Edge Billionaire’s dinner. Attendees include David Brooks, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Zack Bogue. Gallery here. Later reporting (Sept 2019) shows Epstein paid for Edge. (The dinner took place after Epstein is released from prison. Are we really to believe that the richest people in the world didn’t do due diligence? )
Dec 11 2012
Yuri Milner invests in 23andme. (Milner is widely believed to be a front for Russian intelligence.)Late December 2012 Stan and Esther Wojcicki attend birthday party for Yuri Milner with their daughter Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin (and Amanda Rosenberg, Google Glass pr lead, eventual Brin girlfriend)
Feb 26 2013 John Brockman holds his annual Edge Billionaire’s dinner. Attendees include Yuriand Julia Milner, Danny Hillis, Jeff Skoll, Sergey Brin, Zack Bogue, Brin, Page, Wojcicki. Gallery here. Later reporting (Sept 2019) shows Epstein paid for Edge.
Jul 3 2013 Esther Dyson tweets “The most effective way for the United States to prevent Snowden from leaking secrets is to collect and store fewer secrets.”
Sept 27 2013 Jack Ma joins Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki as a funder of the Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize.
May 11 2017 The Story of Masha Drokova, a Putin Acolyte Turned Silicon Valley Investor “Esther Dyson…has been a mentor to Ms. Drokova and backed her visa.
Aug 26 2019
No one from current major investors in 23andme remain on the Board including Esther Dyson observes a puzzled healthcare tech consultant.
The trade isn’t so good. You pay me to give me your DNA and then I use it to make drugs isn’t a very good trade but when you examine this past things become even more disturbing. I question Wojcicki’s judgment.
We should know definitively whether or nor Jeffrey Epstein was an investor in 23andMe. What was he trying to do seeding women with his DNA? What was his new DNA venture about? And where did that training data come from?
Jon Wertheim: But this idea that the value of this company is in the data. This is where the real growth potential is. Your chief scientist said, "It's genius. People were paying us to build databases."
Anne Wojcicki: What we have done is we have empowered individuals with this opportunity to come together, to crowd source research. And I absolutely stand behind: we are going to develop drugs. So that everyone is actually benefiting from the human genome. So absolutely the data is valuable.
Jon Wertheim: I want to keep pushing you on this point. You're relying on the kindness of strangers. You're not paying 'em. They don't have a stake in potential profits. Is that a fair exchange?
Anne Wojcicki: I believe our customers feel that that-- the-- the number one thing that we can do that is going to benefit them is the end result, which is: the end result is actually develop a drug.
No, the end result is to guide your customer to better health outcomes. This is your duty. You are a steward. You are the Lorax, Anne. You are to be DNA’s librarian, Anne. And yes, librarians save the world.
If not, we will nationalize 23andMe.com because it clearly doesn’t belong to America, now does it. We will do it in that most American of ways: through litigation.
Anne should return to her Polish-American roots. Anne’s grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a loyal servant of the American deep state. Janina broadcast on Voice of America. She was a librarian. She was excellent. She was humble. She was a steward.
