Is she a ruthless sociopathwho lied her way to billions – or just guilty of naivety?
The question hanging over trial gripping America
HER platinum-dyed hair is now a softer baby blonde, arranged in a natural wave. The red power lipstick is gone in favour of a fresh-faced nude.
The message it sent was clear: arriving at court this week for Silicon Valley’s ‘Trial of the Century’ was a very different Elizabeth Holmes.
The mesmerising 37-year-old, once dubbed ‘the female Steve Jobs’, has seen her meteoric star fall swiftly since becoming embroiled in one of the most extraordinary sagas of hubris, ambition and deception the tech world has ever seen.
Once celebrated as a paragon of tech culture’s ‘disruptive magic’, the Stanford University dropout was destined to go down in history after building a blood-testing company which had the potential to revolutionise global healthcare.
Along the way she became an icon to millions of women, an example of female empowerment. As the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire she proved you could remain feminine and desirable while ‘kicking ass’ in the boardroom.
But the bubble of self-belief has now well and truly burst. Holmes is accused of fraud and theft to the tune of $700 million, apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of wealthy investors, patients and the entire scientific community by flogging a technology which, as it turned out, simply didn’t work.
The circus-like atmosphere on Wednesday at San Jose’s courthouse in California, where the trial will play out over the next 13 weeks, was almost appropriate, given the circumstances.
For the big question at the very heart of it all remains: is Holmes a conwoman, or simply – as her newly-demure demeanour might have you believe – a deluded victim who believed her own hype?
One source, who met Holmes regularly as she was lauded at glittering awards ceremonies and feted as a cover girl for prestigious publications like Forbes magazine, told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘People wanted to believe in her. There are tens of thousands of start-ups that fail for every Apple, Google, Facebook or Tesla that succeeds.
‘Everyone exaggerates to a degree. When you met Elizabeth you were left in no doubt that she believed in her own genius.
‘She was young and beautiful but she was also whip smart and had come up with a seemingly genius idea which turned her start-up into a $9billion company.
‘She was living the dream.’
But those who exposed the sham at its centre interpret the fairytale far more darkly. Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who wrote the bestseller Bad Blood about his investigation into the affair, says: ‘I think she absolutely has sociopathic tendencies. One of those tendencies is pathological lying.’
Whatever the truth, it will now be probed in Holmes’s much-anticipated trial. She sat impassively as the prosecutor read out 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud which could see her spend the next 20 years in jail, if convicted. The central argument from prosecutors is that Holmes knew it was a scam. ‘She lied and cheated to make billions,’ US Attorney Robert Leach told the court.
Her defence lawyer, Lance Wade, insists the opposite is true. Holmes, he says, is guilty of nothing more than being an ambitious, perhaps naïve young woman who set out to ‘change the world’. So which is it?
In 2003, aged 19, Holmes dropped out of her chemical engineering degree to start Theranos.
Holmes, with a phobia of needles, had designed what seemed like promising new technology – a black box which could perform hundreds of blood tests to identify health conditions using a single, finger-prick sample of blood.
By the time Holmes became the world’s youngest female billionaire, aged 31, in 2015, she had charmed some of the most powerful and influential men on the planet. Two former US Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, invested in Theranos and sat on the board.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was so enthralled he became her single biggest investor to the tune of $100million. But mystery had always surrounded the technology itself. No one was allowed to independently examine the machine.
In 2013 Holmes won a multi-mil
‘No doubt she believed in her own genius’
lion-dollar contract with US pharmacy chain Walgreens to conduct in-store blood testing for customers. Yet as it turned out, only 15 of the 240 tests Theranos offered were being performed on the machines. ‘It was little more than a box of junk,’ said one former colleague.
Then Holmes’s alleged catalogue of lies began to unravel. Whistleblowers went to the Murdochowned Wall Street Journal and it ran a series of stories exposing the technology as a scam. Holmes was charged with multiple fraud counts in 2018.
A jury of five men and seven women will resume hearing the case on Tuesday. Many among the public steadfastly refuse to believe that Holmes is a crook.
‘She’s still got an aura about her,’ one local TV reporter observed. ‘Now she has to persuade a jury of her peers that she’s innocent. If anyone can pull it off it’s her.’
And that, surely, would be Holmes’s most daring feat yet.