What Holmes was selling is a product that already exists too. It is called a Lab-on-a-chip, a device used to make analysis on very small amounts of blood. Just google it if you don’t believe me. It was also already sold commercially before she even dropped out of college, and it is very high tech product that takes a lot of research and investment to design and manufacture, and there was no way a college dropout could actually make one.

But somehow she was able to sell it as something that was actually new and innovative, but was unable to use the money raised from investors to hire a team of competent engineers to design her own Lab-on-a-chip before some journalist found out she was actually using the ones made by other companies and using her investors’ money for that. If she had been better at hiring competent people and managing them, she could have succeeded, but she was just a narcissist crook, so she did not.

Personally, I think the only difference between her and Elon Musk is that Musk is better (or maybe just more lucky) at hiring competent people. He is not better at managing them (his antics at Twitter show that he is actually an extremely incompetent manager), but that was enough for him to have other people actually make the products he was selling and succeed. But they are both narcissist crooks, in my opinion. Musk is just a better crook : he is shady, but knows better than to do anything actually illegal.

It's selling capabilities that don't exist really selling a product that exist?

That’s because you made the mistake of thinking this is a sub about technology.

It isn’t. People don’t discuss the technology and are largely technologically illiterate.

It’s about the high level potential impact of technology, and generally a focus on specific dislikable individuals with high profiles. Cause that’s easy karma points.