Who. Who are these people. By being a fucking journalist Ms. Holmes and Mr. Evans went to the desert oasis for moneyed bohemians. She burned a tribute to Theranos. “There was an incredible sense of grief because I’d given everything to it, my whole life, since I’d been 18,” she said of that period. I dunno man, sounds like contrition to me! Tell me you're a privileged white woman without telling me you're a privileged white woman THERE it is. The Lodge at Torrey Pines is not a hotel. It's a $600-on-weekdays tee fee resort on the most expensive real estate in the United States. Also one of three resorts the Evans own around San Diego. "We're totally normal people! We rent! We have a baby Yoda blanket! How dare you insinuate I grew up playing barbies at Tim Draper's house! How dare you imply the father of my child is 4th generation wasp wealth! Except from a finance and privilege standpoint, they grew up a lot closer to Jared and Ivanka than Bonnie and Clyde. Well that's what happens when you straight-up fucking lie about life-safety medical procedures that you've landed at Walgreen's through sheer chicanery. "I spend my family's money" Yeah 'cuz your parents crimed it all away. Although settling for "senior consultant for BCG" is a pretty cushy consolation prize. See - Elizabeth Holmes' pre-bubble net worth was $4.5b. Adam Neumann? Who lied just as much as Elizabeth Holmes but very carefully didn't break any laws? That MFer's net worth has never dropped below $750m. Make of that what you will. LOL Osama bin Laden believed in something Enron VP argues it's a PR problem, film at 11 As well it should. Elizabeth Holmes prevented investment in female entrepreneurs for a generation. Which was obviously a compelling enough sentiment that the judge ignored the chronic criming, much like the NYT is doing ...so don't flagrantly crime when you're under extreme scrutiny maybe Fun fact: of the 5,523 words in this article, not a one of them contains the phrase "ethic" or "moral". HER SHIT DOESN'T WORK. HER SHIT WILL NEVER WORK. My father in law has fifteen patents in blood testing. I asked him early on how Theranos could work. 'It can't,' he said, with no hesitation. He then proceeded to spend half an hour discussing all the shit they have to deal with, that he has to deal with, for all the blood tests he designed that are sold at mutherfucking walmart. It's not that the whole industry sucks, and is in dire need of disruption? It's that blood is a non-uniform, non-newtonian fluid and the chemistry on all but a handful of tests is elaborate. Full stop. BREED WEIGHT, SIBERIAN HUSKY: 44-60 lbs ADULT MALE PUMA WEIGHT: 120-220 lbs This little anecdote came from a letter from Elizabeth Holmes to the sentencing judge. There's no independent corroboration here. There's no secondary sources. Which, hey, Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the press since 2016 so, okay. AND YET HERE WE ARE. Not asking. Credulously passing it along. I've run across pumas a couple times while running. They're "oh shit I need to get outta here" creatures, not "where's a husky to eat" creatures. And I say that having lived three houses from a residence where a black bear broke down the door, opened the fridge, ate all the lunchmeat and then a schnauzer on his way out. The huskies next door? Barked crazily the whole time, which is how the police knew something was up. And black bears weigh two or three times what pumas do. no words Ms. Holmes, who had a year of freshman-level physics and chemistry at Stanford before dropping out, has opinions on biology that are going to be passed along to NYT readers without comment. 404 ETHICS NOT FOUND This is some Jayson Blair-level recklessness. "...but we're gonna print it anyway because we're the Gray Lady!" If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes,
I tried to ask Ms. Holmes this directly. How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?
Where do you go when your life’s work and reputation go up in flames? … Burning Man.
The following year, in 2019, after U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila set a date for Ms. Holmes’s criminal trial, she and Mr. Evans hit the road.
Mr. Evans, whose parents are prominent hoteliers in San Diego,
Mr. Evans, whose parents are prominent hoteliers in San Diego, and Ms. Holmes have an us-against-the-world ethos that is both romantic and rings slightly of Bonnie and Clyde.
They say they’ve been chased out of residence after residence, no matter how remote.
Mr. Evans took a few calls for work while I was visiting. I asked what he does. “A lot of different stuff, investing, starting companies,” he replied, without elaborating.
How is Ms. Holmes paying her legal expenses? “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work for the rest of my life to try to pay for it.”
An earlier legal team quit after Ms. Holmes could not pay them. One pre-sentencing report by the government put her legal fees at more than $30 million. Ms. Holmes did not detail how those fees would be paid, and her current representatives at Williams & Connolly did not respond to emails asking about her financial arrangement.
By Billy’s father, William L. Evans’s tally, there are “over 67,600,600” web results on Ms. Holmes, all of them negative, compared with “21 million results, many of which are positive” for Osama bin Laden, figures he wrote in a letter to the court.
“Everybody got on the train that Elizabeth was evil, and it was great copy, and they took it and ran with it,” Ms. Holmes’s father, Christian, said.
Don’t girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you …
“There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: you’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,” Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial.
Ms. Holmes said she believed that making herself the poster girl for women in tech put a huge target on her back.
“I never lost sight of the mission but I think I did of the narrative,” she said. “The story became this story that was totally snowballed away from what we were actually talking about.”
What does she think would have happened if she hadn’t garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: “We would’ve seen through our vision.” In other words, she thinks if she’d spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now.
I can’t shake an earlier story that Mr. Evans relayed. In the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching in the woods, digging through brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive.
Everyone knew Balto was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. It’s the same way Ms. Holmes kept hanging on at Theranos.
Over antioxidant smoothies, Ms. Holmes told me she has ideas for Covid testing, drawing on her work in a Singapore lab as a college student during the SARS outbreak.
If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that’s kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn’t much care if we believe her or not.
I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person. She’s gentle and charismatic, in a quiet way. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”
Yet they printed it. The job of an editor at NYTimes is to give personal advice to the reporters. The elephant in the room - is the board of that company. I just searched for "board" in that article. The "rolled" reporter actually encouraged her to say "these promiment men" were there because of sexual attraction! The board is mentioned 3 times. That board would be perfectly at home in a biomedical warfare project. This much is clear: if anyone had actually made fools of these -very- powerful men, they would be suffering the nth degree of Justice Department, not this cuddling in press and the courts. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”
Who. Who are these people.
That last quoted bit sums it all up: Is this piece about Holmes or about the reporter herself? Like is she doing a bad Hunter S. Thompson impression where the reporting is actually autobiography about what a dupe she is? I was slack jawed reading this garbage. Will NYT do rehab piece about Trump next? At least he didn’t crash the economy until his fourth year in office, or some shit.
Not to say something nice about Rupert Murdoch, but it's no surprise that it was the Wall Street Journal that finally broke the story about the fraudulent claims Theranos was making. As you said, anyone who knew anything about blood testing knew something didn't add up. And yet other 'reputable' publications were too busy tripping over themselves to put Homes on magazine covers to do any sort of journalism about what the business was doing.
I've always wondered what the fuck the average Theranos employee did on a day to day basis. I think over 1000 people worked there, so they must have had a lot of technical people who knew that the thing was fucked. Did they just keep throwing shit at the wall and hope that one day the box would work? I'm mystified by the operations of the whole thing, Holmes's marketing notwithstanding.
I'm a book, two documentaries and a miniseries into Theranos and the clear answer is: - things were so compartmentalized that no one ever had a clear picture - anyone who might have a clear picture was fired - they ran the place like a police state - fraternization outside staged company events was heartily discouraged - you took your money and you shut the fuck up - their NDAs were toothy AF and they were extremely litigious It was a real Sand Hill Pyongyang kinda place. The Dropout is, if anything, too kind.