How Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone Else
Source: Wired ·
WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.
From the source
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos , made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. The article —“A Drop of Blood, an Instant Diagnosis”—wasn’t a science story, or even a business story. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal’s editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories—the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter. I was an editor at WIRED back then, and Theranos-as-presented felt very WIRED. It looked like evidence that a Silicon Valley approach to innovation…