HEROES AND VILLAINS

In business disgrace, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is attaining a second celebrity: Her con-artist saga has vaulted from best-selling book to HBO documentary, and, soon, Hulu miniseries and Jennifer Lawrence movie. The needle on the hustle dial for entrepreneurs has long twitched between “legit business owner” and “total fraud.” But, today, Hollywood is landing heavily on the latter. Holmes’s rise as the Dark Steve Jobs (another terrible person, as his daughter’s memoir makes clear) followed Fyre Festival documentaries recounting the sheer audacity of fraudulent “entrepreneur” Billy McFarland. “One of the greatest modern scams,” The NewYorkTimes declaimed, “is the entrepreneurial fetish itself.”

It’s a bleak time for entrepreneurs in pop culture, which once glorified the likes of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. This century we get The Social Network’s callous Mark Zuckerberg and Breaking Bad’s murderous meth dealer. (Said show has “everything you need to know about starting a business,” one TV writer told The Wall Street Journal. Really!) Even those once held up as real-life heroes are struggling. A couple of years ago, Zuckerberg appeared ready to run for president. Now he’s mired in scandals over privacy violations, Russian electoral interference, and even genocide; naturally, Aaron Sorkin is mulling a Social Network sequel. Elon Musk’s superhero avatar, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, has—spoiler alert—exited the Avengers, while Musk’s Twitter habit has landed him in regulatory hot water. Then there’s the baroque fallout from Jeff Bezos’s extramarital affair.

Still, Launch spies a promising narrative glimmering in today’s dark timeline. At least for men: While Holmes awaits her second act (or court date), investors have flocked to fund new businesses of #MeToo’d founders like Mike Cagney of SoFi. What does Hollywood like better than a good villain? A great comeback.