How a college dropout duped wealthy
TV PICK OF THE WEEK
The Dropout, based on the podcast of the same name, starring Amanda Seyfried as the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Famed for her distinctive deep voice and black polo necks, Holmes convinced highprofile figures including media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and tech mogul Larry Ellison to invest in her start-up, claiming she had invented a pioneering blood testing machine, while former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former defence secretary James Mattis sat on the board of the company.
The Stanford University dropout (hence the title) was hailed as “the next Steve Jobs” and “the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire” by business magazines, and Theranos was valued at $9bn (£6.5bn) for its Edison machine.
The machine could supposedly diagnose hundreds of medical conditions using just a few drops of blood, taken by pricking a finger.
The problem was, the machine did not work. Holmes’s recent trial heard of the lengths she went to to conceal this fact.
The dominoes started to fall after a Wall
Street Journal investigation in 2015 found the company had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using the device, and even those had questionable accuracy.
Last month Holmes was convicted by a jury in California of conspiracy to commit fraud against investors and three charges of wire fraud. She had denied the charges, which carry a maximum prison term of 20 years each.