In general, I think alarm bells will ring in the science community any time they hear about a college dropout inventing paradigm shifting and ground breaking technology that PhDs have been working on and studying their entire life to try to achieve. Even if such geniuses were Stanford dropouts. There is a lot of knowledge and technical know-how involved with the STEM field. You can't just wing shyt. You have to put in the time to learn this stuff. Also, things either work or they don't. This is real life science/engineering we're talking about. It's not like financial analysts where you can wear a suit and go on TV to yammer on and on about yields or say generic stuff like "this still looks attractive" and look like you know what you're talking about. Also, the medical and scientific community rely on peer review and data to determine effectiveness of a novel method or a technology. Nobody will go by your word. If people have to go by your word, then that's another red flag. In an unrelated note, wasn't there a former pharma CEO somewhere without a science background who holds patents on drugs? Must be a jack of all trades. Businessman, trader, inventor, scientist.
Sure, Edison's name is on 3000+ patents, because he as the boss put his name on everything what his scientists invented.
The question was not about him, but a non-science CEO of a pharma company, who owned their own researched and developed patent. He never developed any patent as a scientist, he was a business CEO. Nothing wrong with that, but the asker wanted to know similar CEOs to Theranos' boss. He came the closest although I don't know other CEOs...
I think this new financing is similar to buying up Madoff claims 20-30 cents on the dollar hoping that the payoff will be bigger. (it was) "the company reportedly told investors it had secured the money from Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based private equity firm that was acquired by Softbank earlier this year." Some firms have just too much money and they can afford to throw a few hundred mill here or there hoping to hit a 10 bagger.