As The Dropout finally hits our screens, Polly_Dunbar explores how the world’s most powerful men fell for Elizabeth Holmes, and the ultimate scam
As The Dropout finally hits our screens, Polly Dunbar explores how the world’s most powerful men fell for Elizabeth Holmes, and the ultimate scam.
Holmes, a Stanford University drop-out with no medical training, had convinced some of the world’s richest people, including Murdoch and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, to invest billions in her blood-testing business. She claimed she had devised a way to test for a range of health conditions, such as cancer and diabetes, using just a tiny pinprick of blood – an idea she said would put an end to painful traditional blood tests.
Behind the scenes, Holmes knew her technology wasn’t working but she was the embodiment of the ‘fake it till you make it’ ethos, which is virtually a prerequisite for success in Silicon Valley. ‘In that world, if you admit the chances of your idea working are very slim, you’re not going to get investment,’ says Clayton. ‘It means people are always hyping up their product and massaging the figures.
What was different about Theranos from other tech firms that overstate their capabilities was that it was diagnosing – often wrongly – real people’s health conditions. Her trial heard that, after a blood test, one patient was told – falsely – that she was miscarrying; another was given a false positive result for HIV.
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