What makes them special? Large pharma companies tend to lose billions of dollars in valuation when a promising drug fails FDA trials -- clearly, they are unable to "cheat or bribe" the FDA.

What is your point? If Theranos is a scam, then it wouldn't be the first scam operated by overconfident people, or just people with very little risk aversion.

How could Bernie Madoff run a massive Ponzi scheme right under the SEC's nose without expecting to get caught? Well, he did it anyway, and in fact he managed to get away with it for perhaps decades, and if it wasn't for the 2007 financial crisis, I'd bet he would be still running it.

But going back to Theranos, I believe the problem they ran into is local variance: when you analyse tiny amounts of blood, two samples from the same blood draw end up with very different measurements for some quantities of interest. You just need a larger sample and that is a big problem for Theranos.

Maybe. I don't know anything about blood testing, so I can't evaluate their claims at object level. What I know is that their business consists in a product based on an alleged technological breakthrough that they were never been able to conclusively demonstrate. And they are trying to sell to non-experts who aren't able to evaluate the quality of the product that they buy.