It’s over

2022 has barely even started, and you can already mark off one spot on your bingo card: Yesterday, a jury of eight men and four women delivered a verdict in the Elizabeth Holmes fraud trial.

Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors. The jury convicted Holmes on three counts related to defrauding PFM's Brian Grossman, the DeVos family and attorney Dan Mosley. It also found her guilty of conspiracy to commit investor fraud.

But Holmes was found not guilty when it came to defrauding patients. The jury acquitted Holmes on all of the patient-related charges.

• That includes conspiracy to defraud patients and wire fraud for buying over $1 million in ads in Arizona for its services.
• One of the patients had received faulty HIV test results, and another had received incorrect prostate cancer results, but Holmes was found not guilty on both counts.

The jury was deadlocked on a few counts. In a bit of Monday morning drama, the jury told the judge it was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on those counts. After being instructed to deliberate further, the jury said it really couldn’t make up its mind.

• The three counts ended up being related to three other investor charges, and the judge declared a mistrial on those counts only.
• That makes the end total four guilty, four not guilty and three counts unaccounted for.

So what comes next? I, for one, am excited to no longer make the drive to San Jose in the dark of the night to wait in line.

• Holmes will be sentenced, which probably won’t happen for at least a month. She’s likely to face up to 20 years in prison, but she wasn’t taken into custody; she’s out on bail for now.
• The DOJ will have to decide whether it wants to retry the three counts that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict on.
• There’s also the trial of Sunny Balwani, Theranos’ former COO and president, which is scheduled to start soon.

Still, don’t expect this to be some Silicon Valley wake-up call. As I’ve written about before, if there are lessons to be learned here, they’ve already been learned. But once we find out how much jail time is attached, we’ll know at what cost.

— Biz Carson (email | twitter)

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A MESSAGE FROM TRELLO

Michael Pryor, co-founder of Trello (now a part of Atlassian), explains what he's learned along the way and his advice for other companies that are looking to build a truly collaborative culture that keeps employees feeling connected — from wherever they choose to work.

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People are talking

Sen. Rand Paul is leaving YouTube because he thinks “they’re the worst censors”:

• “My goal is to eventually quit Big Tech entirely.”

Bank execs like Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon are cautiously optimistic about moving financial services to the cloud:

• “It’s got to be done with high levels of security and real protection of data and information.”

Twitter users are going off on Matt Damon’s appearance in a Crypto.com ad:

• “The guy who irresponsibly bought a zoo is going to give us investment and purchasing advice?”

Making moves

Cassidy Williams joined Remote as head of Developer Experience and Education. She most recently worked on developer experience at Netlify.

Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy signed with WME. Ramamurthy is the head of International at Clubhouse, and Krishnan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Lauren Belive is SoftBank Group’s new director of Government Affairs. Belive previously worked on U.S. government relations at Zoom.

Dayna Badhorn is the new regional president of Avnet in the Americas. Badhorn has been with the company for over two decades.

AppLovin closed its acquisition of Twitter’s MoPub business. The deal cost $1.05 billion.

In other news

Apple reached a $3 trillion market cap yesterday, making it the first company to ever do so. But that’s not quite the same as being a $3 trillion company: Its cap dipped below $3 trillion before the end of trading.

The White House’s vaccine mandate goes into effect today. Employees need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or wear masks onsite and get tested at least weekly.

Now Facebook has suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account. The platform took her account down for 24 hours for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, just a day after Twitter permanently suspended one of her accounts for the same reason.

AT&T and Verizon delayed new 5G services yesterday, the Washington Post reported, following Federal Aviation Administration concerns about the impact of the wireless networks on air traffic.

Tesla opened a showroom in a region of China facing genocide claims. It’s in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities are conducting an assimilation campaign against religious minorities.

Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen are fighting over crypto. Dorsey said Andreessen blocked him on Twitter, and even now that they’re not on each other’s feeds, the two are still subtweeting each other for some reason.

India wants to look into Apple’s App Store. The country’s watchdog ordered a probe into the App Store after an Indian nonprofit group complained that Apple’s 30% cut from developers hurts competition.

What tech litigation is happening in 2022? There’s the ongoing fight between Apple and Epic, the FTC’s brawl with Facebook and more on the horizon. Protocol broke down all the lawsuits to look out for this year.

R.I.P., BlackBerry. BlackBerry OS 7.1, BlackBerry 10 and other services lose most of their functionality today.

NFTs in your living room

People are spending big on NFTs, only to admire them from a phone or laptop screen. But Samsung is looking to change that this year with NFT support on its TVs.

The company is creating a platform that will let people browse, buy and showcase their NFTs on their TVs. Creators can also use the platform to learn about the blockchain metadata and history behind an NFT. Because what good is an 8K TV if you can’t use it to show off your NFT collection?

A MESSAGE FROM TRELLO

Michael Pryor, co-founder of Trello (now a part of Atlassian), explains what he's learned along the way and his advice for other companies that are looking to build a truly collaborative culture that keeps employees feeling connected — from wherever they choose to work.

Learn more