The New York Times journalist John Carreyrou delivered a story so crazy I almost couldn’t believe it was real. Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford sophomore dropout, managed to dupe a large part of the world with the promise of revolutionary healthcare. Blood testing to be more specific. Given how recently everything fell apart for her, I’m sort of shocked this scandal was never on my radar. I worked in healthcare for crying out loud! In finance, but still.
While it took a long time for the whole operation to shut down, there were obviously plenty of doubters, which is how this novel came to be. John Carreyrou is the investigative journalist who amassed all of this information and essentially brought Elizabeth Holmes’ world crashing down around her. Of course, she wasn’t going down without a fight. But before we get there, let’s take a look back. Elizabeth was, as a I mentioned, a college dropout. During her first semester of her sophomore year she left Stanford in order to patent an idea she’d been working feverishly on during her time off.
From there, all she needed to do was get a couple of big dogs in her corner, which wasn’t very hard for her at all. After I read this book I looked up a few interviews she’s conducted over the years because something that’s noted on quite a bit in this book is the extremely low register of her voice. Now, I’m not saying a woman can’t sound like this, but her deep voice seemed incredibly fake. Like, if I were trying to imitate a man, that’s what I would sound like. Apparently it must have sounded more natural in person, because I believe this, coupled with her absolute confidence in her product made it easy for people to invest in her.
What confuses me most though, is how much her product changed over time, and how much nothing got accomplished over the course of a decade. Although, when you’re lying to everyone but yourself, I suppose it’s easy for people to still stay hyped about such a revolutionary concept. That concept? Running hundreds of blood tests off of one finger prick. Now, that was the base of her idea, but there were many iterations over the years that spawned off of that singular idea. Ideally, she wanted a computer-sized device in the home, so that people could test themselves more often and also be able to adjust medication instantly. This is a super cool idea! She just didn’t have the whole puzzle figured out, and especially not the engineering or science to get it done realistically.
That’s where a lot of the doubt started to come from within her company, Theranos. Elizabeth and her lover Sunny were extremely secretive and defensive, and if they even got the slightest inkling that and employee’s loyalty was wavering they fire them immediately. When things started to unravel, they even started threatening former employees. Thank goodness for their bravery, otherwise this bluff could have been going on forever. Who’s to say that the idea would never work, but just the sloppy nature with which everything was handled seemed to me like it was in fact, destined to fail. Of course, before it all came crashing down she did end up getting Theranos a 9 billion dollar valuation. That’s pretty remarkable.
I suppose my takeaway from reading this, was how could all of these people be fooled in such a grand way? I was stumped by the people raising very legitimate concerns being shut down hardcore by her supporters. Their belief in her words were stronger than proven fact, evidently. I guess having never been in a room with her while she’s pitching her revolutionary medical device, I can’t say how convincing she was. Even though Elizabeth turned out to be a sour apple, you sort of have to admire what she was able to accomplish. She might be one of the best con-workers out there. What’s even more crazy to me is that I don’t think she’s facing any jail time? I could be wrong on that, but either way this story was a fascinating one. I just might have to check out HBO’s documentary about it all, too.