How Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone Else
This article reflects on how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos successfully deceived the media and Silicon Valley investors. It details the role of early, uncritical press coverage in validating the fraudulent company.
Why it matters
It serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of 'hype culture' in tech journalism and venture capital.
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 would work in every industry, including medicine. And at the magazine that first published the idea of the “quantified self,” Theranos’ pitch validated the notion that individuals could take charge of their own health with innovative tech and access to data.
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