Pants On Fire

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is the latest in a line of famous slippery women to capture the public imagination.

- Ann Friedman

Even before it all came tumbling down, Elizabeth Holmes was riveting. Her baritone voice. Those black turtlenecks. The seemingly endless plaudits she received from the tech world. That well-crafted narrative about how her fear of needles and desire to change the world led her to found a company, Theranos, that she said could perform complicated medical tests with only a finger-prick of blood.

She exhibited all the qualities that women are typically discredited for—fashion quirks, outrageous ambition, unusual vocal tics, failure to provide hard evidence—and soaked up rounds and rounds of funding anyway. Theranos’s board was stacked with the kind of old white guys whose approval has long been synonymous with power. Holmes performed a sleight of hand not often achieved by women in public life. She didn’t have to prove herself or her ideas to be handsomely rewarded for them. She was a kind of antiHillary: underprepared, underqualified, and beloved by men.

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged her with massive fraud for “deceiving investors by making it appear as if Theranos had successfully developed a commercially-ready portable blood analyzer,” she is no longer the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. She’s still fascinating, but for an entirely different reason.

In March, Holmes settled with the SEC, which also alleged that she “claimed...that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014. In truth, Theranos...generated a little more than $100,000 in revenue from operations in 2014.” Holmes agreed to pay a $500,000 fine and cede voting control of the company she created. As part of the settlement, she “neither admitted nor denied” any wrongdoing.