THE DROPOUT
There’s been a slew of content recently dealing with a particularly modern criminal phenomenon – the “fake it till you make it” scam artist. Along with Shonda Rhimes’ treatment of fake heiress Anna Delvey’s story, Inventing Anna, on Netflix, there’s Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway having the time of their lives in Wecrashed as Adam and Rebekah Neumann. The couple behind co-working rental venture Wework, at one point, they used their status as entrepreneurs to try to leverage a peace deal in the Israel-palestine conflict – before it turned out they’d used billions of investors’ dollars to enrich themselves and buy a load of office space they couldn’t rent out. Then, there’s The Dropout, on Disney+. It tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), who was once trumpeted as the youngest self-made billionaire in America. Her company Theranos claimed to have developed tech that could diagnose myriad illnesses from a single drop of blood – something that would have revolutionised healthcare in America. The only problem was it was a complete fantasy – what she was promising was scientifically impossible, and she spent almost 13 years trying to cover up this fact while burning through cash trying to realise her impossible dream. The show does a good job of showing that, while Holmes – who was convicted of defrauding investors last year and faces 20 years in jail – may have ostensibly had good intentions, fundamentally, like Delvey and the Neumanns, she was a narcissist, who was obsessed with her own myth and legacy, and whose actions, along with her partner Sunny Balwani (played by Naveen Andrews), may well have put actual lives at risk. In a world where wealth and a nice lifestyle are increasingly unattainable, there is a worry we might become too in thrall to these bozos, but hopefully, shows like this (and the podcast of the same name) will help sharpen our bullshit detectors.