Opinion: Elizabeth Holmes, a capitalist fairy tale
By Elizabeth Bruenig Elizabeth Bruenig Opinion columnist focusing on politics, religion and morality in public life. Email Bio Follow Opinion columnist March 21 at 4:43 PM HBO’s new documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced foundress of tech start-up Theranos, presents itself as a profile of one individual in a long American tradition of maverick innovators, ill-fated and otherwise.
Of course, the same can be said of most medicine. What made Holmes’s quest to defy death so fantastical was the magical element at its core. With only a minuscule amount of blood, Holmes claimed — just a fingertip’s pinprick, like Sleeping Beauty on her spindle — a mysterious, proprietary black box could screen for dozens of diseases and disorders. Holmes would never disclose exactly what went on inside her mysterious machines, insisting that she was entitled to her trade secrets.
Holmes’s personal mythology blended, in other words, with her mythic product. For a while each seemed as plausible as the other. Part of the reason for the fairy-tale-like lifts and turns in Holmes’s story is Silicon Valley, which thrives on — and demands — such yarns; even the WiFi-connected, $700 juice-press guy peddled an inspirational, semi-tragic story about how his own personal aptitude and intuition for freshly pressed juice had birthed the iMac of juicers.
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