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Elizabeth Holmes could certainly speak a good match. Unfortunately, too many people were too willing to listen.
The dishonorable founder of Theranos – and her powerful powers of persuasion – are painstakingly examined in Alex Gibney's latest documentary, "The Inventor: A Bloody Crisis in Silicon Valley." First at the cinema at 21h. On Monday, March 18th on HBO, the film is a cautionary tale that warns about money, greed, big promises and blind trust.
It's also one of two documentaries about the arrival of Holmes and Theranos in the coming days. On Friday at 9:00, ABC will release "The Dropout" under its "20/20" banner. The two-hour show, which was not available at the time of the press, is named and named on the popular ABC News podcast. It is based on a lengthy survey of technology and economics journalist Rebecca Jarvis.
In 2004, at the age of 19, Holmes left Stanford to create a biotechnology company promising to revolutionize health care with a diagnostic device that would allow blood tests to be done more quickly and cheaply. Backed by major investors including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, Theranos was valued at $ 9 billion in 2014, making Holmes the youngest self-produced billionaire in the world.
Only one problem: the technology did not work. Holmes was finally called fraud and the company imploded.
Gibney, whose credits include "Enron: The Smarter Guys in the Room" and "Going Clear: Scientology and Conviction Prison," is clearly fascinated by organizational deception. To get to the heart of the spectacular Theranos debacle, he knows that he has to get into Holmes' head, even relying on a "behavioral economist" to provide answers.
Young, attractive, idealistic, confident and incredibly motivated, she was presented as "the next Steve Jobs". Holmes has dazzled Silicon Valley and Wall Street with his idea of a compact and portable machine that can quickly diagnose many infections and diseases, using only finger-prick blood samples.
She called her camera The Edison, leading Gibney to make comparisons between Holmes and the most famous American inventor. Thomas Edison, says the film, has often promised more than he could offer. The so-called Menlo Park magician knew how to tell a good story and was the first to practice "the art of forgery in Silicon Valley until you make it."
Similarly, Holmes knew the power of a good story. In interviews, she spoke with emotion about having lost a beloved uncle as a result of skin cancer. Her dream, she said, is that fewer people "will have to say goodbye too soon to the people they love." As for her commitment to the vision, well, she liked to quote Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no test. "
Who would not be seduced by this story? Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung, former employees of Theranos and potential whistleblowers, explain in the film how they were trained.
"I was totally gung-ho," he says. "… you wanted (his concept) to be true, so bad."
I've "idolized her," recalls Cheung. "I drank Kool-Aid a little too fast."
It was the same for many other people, including members of the media. And the older men, it seems, were particularly sensitive to Holmes' charm. Former Secretaries of State George Shultz (grandfather of Tyler) and Henry Kissinger, former Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis have all been recruited to serve on Theranos' Board of Directors which gives it great credibility.
The problem is that they and others have failed to analyze what was going on behind the scenes. For years, Holmes would have misled investors and distribution partners such as Safeway and Walgreens, refusing to reveal that Theranos machines were riddled with defects and were prone to breakdowns. A former employee described it as a "comedy of errors".
These errors have long been masked when Theranos falsified the test results and ignored the reality checks in a highly paranoid work environment created by Holmes and his main trading partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. The departments have been separated. The emails have been monitored. Employees who waved red flags were quickly dismissed in favor of those who joined the program.
Only when the investigative journalist John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal, who appears in the film, began to stick his nose in Theranos if the company's schemes were revealed. In 2018, federal prosecutors indicted Holmes and Balwani for conspiracy to commit fraud. They both pleaded not guilty.
For more than two hours, Gibney chronicled all this by mixing interviews, graphics and numerous shots through the deserted Theranos headquarters in Palo Alto. In the latter case, you have the impression of being in an isolated ghost town, and the cold undeniably reigns.
Contact Chuck Barney at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.com/chuckbarney and Facebook.com/bayareanewsgroup.chuckbarney.
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