Theranos: Fake it ‘till you make it
By Ben Chen
December 2024
I’m sure everyone wants to make money without actually putting in the effort. Your first thought might be to dropship a product, resell products, or maybe even give sports betting a try. Elizabeth Holmes would say you’re not thinking big enough. Straight from Silicon Valley, Holmes and her tech starter pack turtleneck promised to revolutionize healthcare by creating a machine that could do what 1,000 blood tests couldn’t do, with just a single drop of blood. Any high schooler, let alone medical professionals and investors would be skeptical of this machine, but there was no place for skepticism in Silicon Valley, where miracles have happened over and over.
Holmes had to pull off the tech startup look to convince investors her product actually worked, and what better way is there than copying Steve Job’s wardrobe? She must’ve pulled the look off spectacularly alongside her artificially deepened voice, as she collected a total of nearly a billion dollars from VCs willing to throw money at anything out of the Bay area, tech titans, and ex-CEOs that could only see the financial upside and lacked the common sense of an 11 year old.
Elizabeth Holmes had a conundrum; she had promised all these people great things, yet didn’t have the brains or technology to fulfill those promises. So she did what anyone would do: lie and fake the results. Her Edison device, named after Thomas Edison (who was notorious for never finishing his own projects), was supposed to produce all sorts of information off a few microlitres of blood. Investors were evidently suspicious of this, yet it seemed to work perfectly! Turns out, it was more theater than technology. Holmes had handpicked specific investors that she had found previous bloodwork on, and the Edison device displayed this information proudly after just 3 seconds of processing. “It’s miraculous!”, all the investors must’ve exclaimed.
After being featured on the front of Forbes and years of praise in the public eye, it’d all come crashing down in the end when pesky reporters and insiders gave the secrets away, not unlike someone exposing a magician’s tricks. Theranos went under, leaving its many investors crushed. What happened to Holmes? She avoided most of the fallout by blaming everyone but herself, just like any big cap CEO would. Although she has been charged with 4 counts of defrauding investors and an 11 year prison sentence, there’s nothing money can’t fix. She is currently serving her prison sentence at FCI Bryan, a minimum security daycare for anyone with a few bucks to spare. Amenities include a track, library, TV, and personal music player. She’ll have to take time and savour it, as multiple months have already been cut off from her sentence and many more to come.