‘People wanted to believe the fairytale’: the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes

theguardian.com:

Elizabeth Holmes will find herself behind the walls of a Texas prison on Tuesday, in a remarkable fall for a startup founder who had become an icon known far outside Silicon Valley.

Holmes, 39, had once promised to revolutionize the medical world, but was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors in her blood testing company, Theranos.

It was a stunning turn for an entrepreneur who had once riveted the tech world. Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 at the age of 19, set on developing a company that would turn upside down the field of medical diagnostics.

She had filed a patent for a technology that aimed to perform a wide range of tests on a small amount of blood, a development that would eliminate the need for large blood samples for diagnostics.

For years, Theranos operated in stealth mode. But by 2013, it started attracting widespread attention and Holmes became a media darling, easily recognizable with her distinctive blond hair, black turtle necks and husky voice.

“Here was a photogenic, telegenic young woman posing as the female Steve Jobs,” Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley who holds a professorship at the University of Washington, said ahead of Holmes’s trial. “It was an incredibly alluring narrative that everyone wanted to believe.”

“Holmes was going to be the first woman who reached billionaire status and join the pantheon of tech leaders,” said John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose investigation into the company was key to exposing its lies. “People were really rooting for her – young girls were writing her letters. A lot of people wanted to believe the fairytale, because it would have represented real progress in a very male-dominated world of