Elizabeth Holmes did not change the world, as she once promised, but she certainly captured its attention. The story of the founder of the now defunct blood-testing company Theranos is everywhere. There is a bestselling book, a popular podcast and a new documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, directed by the Oscar winner Alex Gibney, which premiered in the US on Monday.
Why are we so obsessed with Holmes? Elementary, my dear reader: she is a mesmerisingly modern morality tale. A photogenic 19-year-old Stanford dropout starts a revolutionary blood-testing company, which police are now investigating as a possible multibillion-dollar scam. Powerful men such as Henry Kissinger give her their backing. Holmes is named the US’s youngest self-made female billionaire before the authorities come knocking and a criminal case is mounted. If you had pitched the story to Hollywood, they would have said it was far-fetched.
The Theranos story resonates because it encapsulates enduring societal fears about dangerous temptresses. Gibney’s documentary is not shy about the fact Holmes’s success was partly due to how she entranced older powerful men. Indeed, she seems to have entranced Gibney. “I wonder if I was too generous,” Gibney said when the Guardian asked about his film’s somewhat sympathetic treatment of Holmes, who denies the allegations.
As well as capturing enduring gender anxieties, the Theranos story is also a reflection of the technological zeitgeist. Gibney believes Holmes was so successful because of Silicon Valley’s “fetishisation of the entrepreneur”. Holmes’s entire persona, after all, seems to have been an exercise in myth-making. She dropped out of college, like Mark Zuckerberg. She borrowed Steve Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck and bizarre eating habits. She faked a deep baritone to make herself more authoritative. If you were to come up with a piece of performance art reflecting our expectations of “tech geniuses”, you could not have done a better job than Holmes. What an incredibly scary thought.
