The Magnificent Ascent and Catastrophic Descent of Elizabeth Holmes

In the fantastical realm of Silicon Valley, the ethos of “fake it till you make it” meets its ultimate reckoning.

SAN FRANCISCO — At the twilight of Elizabeth Holmes’s legal odyssey, her legal team entered into evidence her rigorous self-improvement regimen.

Commencing with a handwritten missive, “4 a.m. Rise and thank God,” the memo unfolded a sequence of exercise, meditation, prayer, and breakfast (including whey and, amusingly, “bannanna”). By 6:45 a.m., a time when most sluggards were still wrestling with the snooze button, she already graced the halls of Theranos, the blood-testing behemoth she birthed in 2003.

Ms. Holmes imposed a myriad of mandates at Theranos: “I am never a minute late. I show no excitement. ALL ABOUT BUSINESS. I am not impulsive. I know the outcome of every encounter. I do not hesitate. I constantly make decisions and change them as needed. I speak rarely. I call bullshit immediately.”

It was effective. Ms. Holmes’s unwavering resolve, neatly fitting into the Silicon Valley archetype of achieving the unattainable by refusing to acknowledge its impossibility, cultivated belief until the very moment when a jury officially pronounced her guilty on four counts of fraud.

The verdict marked the denouement of an era. In Silicon Valley, where the boundary between rhetoric and accomplishment often blurs, the era of pretense finally meets its limit.

From her collegiate dropout origins at Stanford University to Theranos’s stratospheric $9 billion valuation to her conviction, it’s a saga of monumental ascent and catastrophic plummet that will echo through the corridors of Palo Alto’s coffee shops and juice bars until the tech elite set sail for new frontiers in Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ extraterrestrial colonies. For a decade, Ms. Holmes duped shrewd investors, hundreds of brilliant minds, a star-studded board, and a media desperate to coronate a new luminary, even if lacking in credentials.

Just as Silicon Valley caricatures American ideals of industriousness and rapid wealth accumulation, so Ms. Holmes epitomized a heightened version of Silicon Valley itself.

Elizabeth Holmes and her accomplice, Billy Evans, exiting the federal courthouse in San Jose, Calif.
Credit…
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Her pursuit of self-improvement mirrored traditions dating back to Ben Franklin, finding its apotheosis in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation of Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic, captivating, affluent swindler.

Ms. Holmes, in many ways, was Gatsby’s kin. Both adhered to stringent schedules and rules, each in pursuit of their respective dreams: Gatsby, immortalized in Fitzgerald’s prose, listed his objectives for self-improvement, including elocution practice and the study of inventions.

The parallels with Ms. Holmes extend to Gatsby’s idiosyncratic spelling corrections. “No more smokeing or chewing,” he admonished himself.

Gatsby thrived as a bootlegger, leveraging Wall Street for deceitful gains. Ms. Holmes chose Silicon Valley, the apex of human ambition. In the early 2000s, it promised to revolutionize every facet of existence: transportation, social connections, commerce, governance, currency.

In comparison, blood-testing appeared a trivial feat, particularly given Ms. Holmes’s innate knack for salesmanship, rivaling even that of Steve Jobs. In a 2005 interview on the radio show Tech Nation, she expounded on Theranos’s vision:

“Our focus was on crafting a personalized medical tool accessible to every individual at home, enabling real-time analysis of blood samples on a daily basis.”

Who could resist such innovation? Theranos purportedly streamlined a messy, protracted medical process into a painless, effortless endeavor. “A little teeny needle that pulls a little teeny drop of blood,” she enthused. The software would handle the rest.

Tech Nation’s host, Moira Gunn, boasting advanced degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering, was captivated. “How old are you, Elizabeth?” she inquired.

“I’m 21,” Ms. Holmes replied.

Her youth wasn’t a point of skepticism but rather a testament to the staggering nature of her claims. “I’m gonna go tell my two children, they better get off their duffs,” exclaimed Ms. Gunn.

Ms. Holmes asserted that Theranos’s device was in the “production phase,” anticipating a release to pharmaceutical partners by mid-to-late that year. Thirteen years later, as the company dissolved, no such device materialized.

In 2005, even reinventing blood-testing at 21 wasn’t sufficient, such were our expectations of prodigiousness. When queried about her future endeavors, Ms. Holmes echoed the quintessential Silicon Valley refrain: You haven’t seen anything yet.

She claimed Theranos already possessed prototypes for subsequent generations of the device, boasting miniaturization for enhanced speed and throughput. It would be fully automated: “You don’t even have to touch your finger on the device.”

In one of her earliest media appearances, Ms. Holmes touted a functioning device capable of analyzing health without physical contact. Yet, no one challenged her assertions. Little wonder she and her deputy and romantic partner, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s COO known as “Sunny,” believed they could brazen it out in the Silicon Valley tradition until a functional product emerged.

This is the age of credulity. William Perry, a Theranos board member and former Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, a luminary in mathematics, engineering, and academia, lauded Ms. Holmes’s social conscience. He refrained from commenting further.

Steve Jobs, posthumously, could have been Theranos’s most effective recruiter. Adam Rosendorff, a lab director at Theranos, testified during Ms. Holmes’s trial that he envisioned the company as “the next Apple,” inspired by a biography of the Apple co-founder.

“The whole excitement around Steve Jobs was very compelling to me,” he remarked. “I wanted to make a more global impact on health care, and I thought that joining a diagnostics company would help me do that.”

Mr. Rosendorff grew disillusioned prior to the exposure of Theranos’s misleading claims, but Mr. Perry persisted until December 2016, when the start-up’s survival efforts faltered.

With devotees such as these, Ms. Holmes’s dream must have seemed tantalizingly close to fruition. A few more late nights from the engineering team, a few more magazine covers extolling her genius, and success would surely be assured.

So where does this conviction leave the rest of us — her dupes, her facilitators, her investors, and erstwhile admirers?

Primed for the next charlatan who comes our way, most likely. Some Silicon Valley promises are so seductive, we simply cannot resist them. Immortality. Cryptocurrency. Flying vehicles. Martian colonization. Digital utopia. Wealth beyond measure.

As Fitzgerald penned, we remain forever susceptible to the allure of an ever-receding, orgiastic future.

David Streitfeld has chronicled technology and its societal impacts for two decades.