bunch of vacuous art-world scenesters that she was a millionaire heiress who just needed to hold a couple grand. On today’s terms, figures like Malachi Love-Robinson and Anna Delvey are highly inspirational. As women’s conference after women’s conference might have told me had I attended them, it’s precisely that kind of self-delusion—deciding beyond all reason that you should have something, and then going for it—that will get you somewhere in this world.
That was, anyway, the preferred tactic for Elizabeth Holmes, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and founder of Theranos, a health technology company that was once valued at $9 billion despite the fact that its revolutionary blood-test technology did not actually exist. A maniacally disciplined blonde with stressed-out hair, a Steve Jobs obsession, and a voice that sounded like it was being disguised to preserve her anonymity, Holmes had become fixated, at age nineteen, on the idea of a machine that could perform a vast array of blood tests from a pin prick. (She had a lifelong fear of needles: this was central to her personal myth.) She founded Theranos in 2004, raised $6 million by the end of the year, and began stacking her board of directors with big names: Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Sam Nunn, David Boies. She had Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos as investors. Her TED Talk went viral. She got a New Yorker profile and a Glamour Woman of the Year award; she spoke at Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival; Forbes labeled her the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. And then, in 2015, John Carreyrou published an article in The Wall Street Journal exposing Theranos as a shell game. The company, which by then had contracted with Walgreens and Safeway, was performing most of its blood tests using other companies’ machinery. Its pin-prick technology had never worked as advertised. Its executives had been cheating proficiency tests.
At first, Holmes resisted the story. In a company meeting, she suggested generating sympathy for herself by revealing that she had been sexually assaulted at Stanford. She went on CNBC and said, “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” But Carreyrou was right about everything. For years, Holmes and her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, had been firing or silencing anyone who knew the truth. In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave Holmes a two-year ban on owning or operating a diagnostic lab. In March 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued her; in return, she consented to return her Theranos shares, give up voting control, and be barred from serving as an officer of a public company for the next ten years. In May 2018, Carreyrou published Bad Blood, a book-length investigation of the rise and fall of Theranos, in which Holmes’s belief in her own significance appears to border on sociopathic zealotry: at one point she proclaims, at a company party, “The miniLab is the most important thing humanity has ever built.” In June 2018, Holmes was indicted by a federal grand jury on nine counts of fraud.
Holmes, unlike Billy McFarland and Anna Delvey, never became the subject of ironic celebration. This is partly because she did more than scam a bunch of rich assholes. (Americans like it when this happens, in part because many of us feel, instinctively and accurately, that rich assholes have generally benefited from the scams that pushed the rest of the country down.) Holmes went further: she knowingly toyed with the health of strangers for the sake of her own wealth and fame. Mostly, though, the scale of Holmes’s fraud is too horrifying to be funny. She was toppled eventually, but for years, she was one of the biggest success stories in the world. The absurd length of time that it took for Holmes to be exposed illuminates a grim, definitive truth of our era: scammers are always safest at the top.
The Disruptors
Amazon, a company now worth $1 trillion, was originally going to be called Relentless. Jeff Bezos’s friends told him that the name sounded too aggressive, but he hung on to the URL anyway—if you type in relentless, you’ll find yourself on Amazon, at which you can buy almost anything you could think of: an 1816 edition of the Bible ($2,000); a new hardcover copy of #GIRLBOSS ($15.43); a used paperback #GIRLBOSS ($2.37); paranormal romance ebooks published by Amazon itself (prices vary); a Goodyear SUV tire ($121 with Amazon Prime); a Georgia-Pacific automated paper-towel dispenser ($35 with Prime);