The outcome of Elizabeth Holmes’s trial partly hinges on how jurors answer the question of whether investors in Theranos Inc. were savvy speculators who made an unwise but informed bet or were hoodwinked by a lying founder.
Theranos’s investors, who bet almost $1 billion on the company and lost nearly all of it, are a disparate group: a professional football team owner, a media magnate, a Mexican tycoon, a four-star military general, a Greek shipping heir and the family office of a billionaire Republican Party donor, who all invested alongside the hedge funds and venture-capital firms that more traditionally back startups.
