Ask HN: Was Elizabeth Holmes just a face controlled by people in the background?
She drops out of Stanford to start a blood-testing start-up. Plot-twist, she has no background in blood or testing.
Her company makes various blood testing prototypes. Plot-twist, they're actually glue-guns bought off Amazon.
Her company gets a contract from US's largest pharmacy chain to do blood-tests. Plot-twist, her company doesn't use its own machines to do this, but uses off-the-shelf machines that are already standard.
Her team files over 200 patents. Plot-twist, she's a co-inventor in 98% of them.
There are a lot of recordings of her talking. Plot-twist, they all consist of word-salad talking points, about using technology to change the world, without anything substantive.
She dressed like Steve Jobs, lowered her voice artificially to a baritone to sound more "deep", and used cool-sounding branding like "Edison", "nanotainer", "Theranos", "Balto". Plot-twist, her head-scientist committed suicide.
When she was 10, she wrote in a school year book that she wanted to become a billionaire. Plot-twist, she became one.
I have 2 hypotheses:
1) She was a face (a front) for a group of shadowy fraudsters (VC's?), who almost managed to pull of one of the biggest heists in history.
2) This is very common. Any "media hyped" startup out there fronted by an attractive founder with an implausible origin story is suspect.