Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that work involved cleaning.) As almost everyone knows Elizabth Holmes had dropped out of Stanford so she could get rich. She had an idea for a device that would revolutionize blood testing, a nifty idea. Unfortunately it never worked but she insisted in public it did and fraudulently manipulated the data behind the scenes to prevent investors from recognizing that. When VP Biden visited the Theranos lab in 2015 he was presented with rows of machines. The Problem was they were all fake.
She persuaded numerous well-known people to sit on the board and invest. As a young, attractive woman, perhaps that influenced the older men who jumped on board. (Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were among them. Ironically, Schultz, who got his grandson a job at Theranos, refused to believe him when the grandson reported the "place was rotten.") I don't know. Then again, I always wondered about John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin who seemed to offer little except a nice face. The media fell for it, too. Adoring profiles appeared in numerous magazines that did not do their homework. CEOs at Safeway and Walgreens were not immune to her spell.
I found this quote from the NY Times review particularly apt: "Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.
The media was completely bamboozled and fawned all over her. All sorts of evidence was there from employees who were quitting in droves, but they were never interviewed. The old geezers on the board had even been warned by relatives who worked at the company to no avail. The old guys were so enamored of this pretty thing with nice legs that they abandoned their fiduciary responsibility and really should have been held responsible for the disaster. David Boies doesn't escape condemnation either. The esteemed lawyer who charged $1000 per hour had a stake in the company, violating all sorts of ethical tenets, sued anyone who might say something negative about the company, harassing them with private detectives and threats.*
Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend, ex COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, are now under indictment facing decades of imprisonment if found guilty. As further evidence of her cold manipulative personality, detractors cite her becoming pregnant just before the trial was to begin (resulting in a postponement) as a calculated move to garner sympathy. The story is not over and several podcasts (The Dropout and Bad Blood: the Final Chapter) are reporting on the trial.
Society functions well only when there exists a level of trust. We want (and need) to assume that people are not fooling us. It's OK to be moderately skeptical but actions like Holmes's raise the skepticism bar to an impossible level that will eventually stifle progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment