Would we see Sam Bankman-Fried, the boss of the crypto platform FTX, whose collapse is still being talked about, or Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, whom the best-selling magazine liked to imagine as the future Steve Jobs of medtech, and who has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison for deceiving her investors?

Because the two cases have striking similarities. Young, audacious, promising and acclaimed by their ecosystem, Elizabeth and Sam were allegedly also liars, cheeky...and ended up very rich (for a while). Their sin? To play on the gullibility of capital providers, making them believe that they were doing great things, in order to get the most out of them. In both cases, if the window was shiny, it looks like the back office was empty.

At MarketScreener, we had fun imagining Frauds, the dark counterpart of the prestigious Forbes magazine. Each of our two headliners proudly occupied the front page of the real Forbes at the height of their glory. Now that the alledged malpractices of the two entrepreneurs have been revealed, it seemed legitimate to dedicate the first page of this imaginary publication to these modern-day tricksters.

Drawing by Amandine Victor for MarketScreener