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Elizabeth Holmes is the reigning queen of infatuation – with her odd-looking baritone-style Romy White, her black turtlenecks and her theater club makeup that gives the impression of wearing it while giving herself a TED Talk in the miror. Holmes, the abandoned group of Stanford who founded Theranos, the $ 9 billion biotech company that would revolutionize health care by democratizing the blood draw process, is the focus from a profusion of content since all this was revealed as a fraud in 2015., a documentary by filmmaker Alex Gibney titled L & # 39; inventor aired last night on HBO, tries to answer the question of what motivated Holmes to lie for a decade about the real viability of the technology she had imagined.
Gibney – in his scruffy signature, recreating style and heavy footage footage that turns out more nerdy than atmospheric in this movie (in the middle of Theranos startups he has a PowerPoint feel) – spends a lot of time to warm up the idea that Holmes considered himself in a long line of American inventors and entrepreneurs before ending up with juicy and scammers. Not only did Holmes refer to the Theranos device as a legendary signature: the printer-sized Edison, which could supposedly badyze a patient's blood from a single patient Painless, fast and low cost sting. She left Stanford at age 19, just like her inspiration Steve Jobs, and imitated her ascetic lifestyle, earning billions of dollars in investment (and a $ 9 billion valuation) from the biggest names in funding by CR while living essentially in the Theranos. Offices of Palo Alto.
L & # 39; inventor is right to devote Holmes' obsession to the story of his society, of his place in the history of the break, but also of his pbadionate non-conformist identity seeking to save the world, condemn. Holmes says that losing his uncle because of illnesses made him want to create a world in which "no one has to say goodbye too soon," repeated an anecdote so often that like to look at the compliment that Lady Gaga addressed Bradley Cooper for supporting him. role in A star is born, It quickly becomes clear that this emotional speech is also Theranos marketing. While the technology behind her business is becoming more and more flawed, a researcher recounts how Holmes was rather concerned about the name of the cloud drive in which test results would remain after their delivery by the Edison (apparently eventually called "Yoda") . . Holmes walks with robotics, darkly through the vitreous Theranos seat in undeniably captivating images – you can almost hear him imagine what a voiceover in a documentary will inevitably tell about him.
But where the film loses all power, it is by highlighting the nobility of Holmes' declared mission of having blood tests performed on people without insurance or the possibility of consulting a doctor. He does this primarily through the behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely, who is involved in the story of Holmes' rise and fall to talk to us about the psychology of deception and motivation. Ariely has a surprisingly optimistic view of Holmes from his first appearance, claiming that "no one disputes that his motives were positive". Gibney uses an elaborate, slow-motion chart from Mohegan Sun, to illustrate a behavioral study that says: People lie to receive money if they are told that part of that money goes to charity rather than if they are told to keep everything – it is supposed to help us understand that greed can be a piece of altruism. People say, "I want more money, but it's for a good cause," says Ariely, "so it's a slippery slope." Silicon Valley encourages investors to take these risks because they are motivated by emotion. history, the possibility of a paradigm shift, opening a rather edentulous interlude about how VCs "go with their instinct". The narration of Alex Gibney at the beginning of the film sums up this point of view with a little play on words: "Understanding what happened is worth looking beyond the price of the stock to the value of l & # 39; history. "
Except, here's the problem: it's really not the case. "Looking beyond" all that Elizabeth Holmes, her colleagues, investors and shareholders realized during the course of Theranos (before they lose everything, of course) is precisely what which allowed the fraud to last so long from the beginning. in law. Money is what Holmes was looking for and those who had bought his ploy, even though it was dressed in history to help people. Of course, it goes without saying that Theranos solved the problem of functionality when it became apparent that Edison was not working, sending the patient's blood work to be completed by proprietary machines. other companies and insisting that their Theranos results even though they may not be accurate. If his motives were as indisputable as Ariely said so well, how could Holmes endanger people's lives by sending them to the hospital for cat and MRI exams that were incredibly expensive – and useless?
More importantly, Holmes 'greed is also clearly expressed by his sincere desire to bring Edisons "to every American home," which has only partially materialized thanks to Walgreens' failed partnership with Walgreens. It is this vision that reveals the true crime of Theranos: she has deployed the languages of progress and kindness to acquire astronomical capital. And it's an insidious rot shared by Silicon Valley and adventurous capitalism in general. Holmes wanted to create something as ubiquitous as Apple, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos's Amazon or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, companies revealed to defend human rights and privacy while reducing conflicts and the elections and by releasing their domination. professed humanism. And why not her? The benefits, not only for these CEOs, but for their shareholders, their management boards and even their first employees, have been rarely appreciated by anyone in the history of humanity. As Phyllis Gardner, a professor at Stanford University, has described, one of Holmes' first detractors who is a voice of reason in L & # 39; inventor– Especially compared to Tim Draper, a Holmes prosperist dressed in Bitcoin, who makes billionaires walk on campus "is a strange morality" (Gardner is also vital in reminding how much of Holmes' investors and champions were men, who saw her entrepreneurial identity as part of her singularity, just like Holmes, whose corporate feminist style Lean-In, "one of the only women in the room," is now as familiar as Mark Zuckerberg's hoodie .)
Capitalism is only a little behind the scenes of the human drama of L & # 39; inventor unfolds. "The vehicle of a company is the best tool to make a change," says Holmes. She learned that she had learned to disrupt health care. The implication was that the government did not do it. Democrat and Republican Candidates from 2020 Discuss the Viability of Medicare for All, What Gibney's Film Does So Little to Unveil This Idea, Given That Holmes Himself Reasons the Contrary Belief That Ability to Care of ourselves and our loved ones Human rights are a "fundamental human right". And especially considering Holmes 'list of investors and board members: Donald Trump' s former secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, the former Wells executive director. Fargo, Richard Kovacevich, Walton Walmart, Devoses, Murdoch and Henry Kissinger. . It's a real Who-Who of private sector followers, some of whom are or have been installed in an administration currently defending the interests of private insurance. In a strange scene, Vice President Joe Biden reads praise for what appears to be the Wikipedia page of Elizabeth Holmes, a perfect representative of the last administration who oversaw a vexed attempt at health system reform. John Carreyrou, who wrote the the Wall Street newspaper An investigation that finally led Holmes to death seems to at least indicate that these powerful links have probably protected Holmes from any regulatory interest. But there is a vast vocal range of health sector activists who are very well aware of the access and cost issues that Theranos claimed to want to address, which could have added the political and economic context of which they had so much needed if they had been invited to speak. , even if it is not bady. Or, we could have given other victims the opportunity to put a face to human suffering in the American health care system, with the exception of Elizabeth Holmes: Not a single person whose blood tests had been processed fraudulently by Theranos L & # 39; inventor.
At one point in the documentary, behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely revealed that he himself had been brought in as an expert to help Theranos employees with "motivation". A quick Google shows that it's actually no stranger to a Silicon filled with ottomans. Valley, after investing in applications, an insurance company and even a company bought by Google. Is this the problem L & # 39; inventor reflect? The fact that they "did it for the money" simply implies too many people, especially the most powerful ones, and that, for that reason, is a bit – even – boring? In a recent interview with the guardianJulia Carrie Wong, in which she said she found her documentary surprisingly likeable to Holmes, also admitted that he wondered if he was too "generous". When David Boies, the legal power of Harvey Weinstein, appeared as the board of Elizabeth Holmes I She felt almost overwhelmed by the situation as a whole, as a person rather discreetly situated, simply overwhelmed by the way influence is exercised and crossed in a country supposedly based on meritocracy. It's also how I felt about the scandalous university admissions scandal that erupted last week and that has hit Hollywood institutions, technology and the American elite that bring together decision-makers and presidents. When you begin to understand that the characters of these extreme stories about the profound deference of our country to earn money are all identical, it begins to look much less like a playful and independent place, and a little more to an Empire aristocracy . And that certainly This is not the original story that we like to tell.
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