And now Carly Fiorina is hustling a Senate seat!
Let us consider the sad example of Lucent. During the dot-com era, a myriad of obviously-never-gonna-make-a-dime-in-profit companies were accorded all kinds of bizarre adulation, including sycophantic coverage in the business press and IPOs at delusional valuations.
So the whole business model was greater-fool theory. And it wasn’t just the poor dumb stock buyers who were duped, but vendors.
I am not familiar with the details of the arrangements, but when Carly Fiorina was head of marketing at Lucent, she ramped up sales (and her compensation along with it) by selling equipment by the boatload to these ultimate dot-bomb enterprises in return for paper of various sorts that proved to be worthless.
[Many had the] misfortune to ride the stock down from $100 a share to $1. – source: Yves Smith