I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
They still say it about Sam Bankman Friendman and that failed situation awareness fund dude that worked for him.
They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
Musk as well among others.
I mean, plenty of men have done the same thing. No imagination required.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
It's just pattern recognition at work. None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam, so it's about as notable as a scam founder wearing black shoes.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
> But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by.
Only by sexists.
> None of the male-led scams have "being male" as a talking point trying to sell the scam
If she never mentioned being female I don't remember it. In fact she used to talk in a fake man-voice to sound serious. Other people used the fact that she was a woman to sell the scam because it is still uncommon for a woman to be in that position. There was no possible way for her to avoid it, even by pulling her hair back hard, talking in a goofy deep voice, and dressing like Jobs.
edit: my point, if it's not clear, is that the fact that women founders are fewer is why people focused on her being a woman. If that's used to ignore future woman founders, making them rarer, it's a degenerate pattern recognition.
The patterns did not form themselves.
It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”
Scammers/predators/grifters/sociopaths will adopt any disguise and say whatever needs to be said that gets the mark to fall for it.
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
> Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage.
TheLastPsychiatrist used a good phrase to describe this: cognitive kill-switch. Anything that stops further examination or exploration of an assertion is a CKS. In Holmes' case, the CKS was "you're just sexist if you don't believe"...
Appreciate you taking the time to engage, unlike those that eye rolled and down voted. (They don’t like admitting their participation in pattern formation it would seem.)
> Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'.
The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic.
Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur").
Unfortunately, the gender sale was a big part of the scam. I'm looking at many male-led scams, and they did not sell it based on the gender of the scammer.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
No, it only proves that you have ideology deeply rooted. I believe you see sexism everywhere. The type of person you just want to say "oookay, huh, is sexism here, in the room with us?"
The point is that anything subject to hype is also at a greater risk of being a scam.
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
That’s only true in the public Zeitgeist, there is a huge preference among portions of the workforce for male leadership stated or unstated. This is not a good thing. I literally worked with a guy who was about to quit because a woman would boss him around and she was about 10,000 times as qualified as he was
then again, how good a manager would she have made if she was bossing around colleagues to the point of them quitting?
Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect.
I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
Or perhaps this guy perceived normal, appropriate management that he would have been perfectly fine with had it come from a man as “bossy” when it came from a woman.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
Only if you're determined to look for it.
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
> No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men.
They do? Epstein totally did that. Thiel totally does that. All those deeply conservative male leaders do that.
I regret engaging, comment removed.
EDIT: luckily I quoted the things I was replying to, because the above poster drastically edited his/her post, just resorting finally to namecalling.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
> No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
No one cares about women entering a sporting contest in the men's category because there is no such thing. There are open categories, and there are restricted categories. The women's category is a restricted category, because 50% of the population deserve their own champions. Just like there are childrens' categories, categories for people who live in Gary, Indiana, and categories for people with different levels of paraplegia.
The fact that roughly half of people are men and half are women causes the open category to often be referred to as the "men's" category, but it is not. If a woman can and wants to compete in the "men's" category, she should. If this results in a crowding out of men in the rankings of some sport, they should feel free to start an actual restrictive men's category for that sport. Men's and women's bodies, socialization, and opportunities to practice are different. Men are 50% of the population and deserve their own champions.
edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
That might depend on the event, but the first thing that came up disproves your blanket claim. It's from World Boxing:
As part of this policy, World Boxing will operate two categories as determined by sex: a men’s category and a women’s category. To be eligible for the men’s category, a competitor must be male at birth. To be eligible for the women’s category, a competitor must be female at birth. [0]
> edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
I don't think so. No one cares about male competitors who aren't the best of the best.
[0] https://worldboxing.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/World-Box...
I enjoyed your response, sorry about that
No one markets ‘male founder’ as a reason to trust the business. Once gender is framed as a virtue, people start asking whether that claim actually means anything.
The government does! At least right now in the United States. And yeah, I think it's reasonable for people to start asking.
No one thinks that the number of males participating in business is too low, and that it is socially-beneficial and morally-important to promote male-run businesses.
This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.
Scamming as a male can actually improve your reputation. Donald Trump is currently the president of the united states despite years of ripping people off. If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
Unfortunately he was a registered Democrat.
So was Trump. To a true scammer, politics is just another grift.
> If Bernie Madoff could run as a republican senator, I'd given him decent odds to win.
And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
Because Madoff scammed rich people. You can get away with a lot if you scam the poor. Not so much when you target the wealthy.
That makes no sense within the topic of conversation.
Here’s how I think it makes sense: accountability for unethical behavior arrives via more or less direct routes depending on who you are.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
This is true, but I think my point still holds. If he were to get of jail, say by donating a substantial sum to Trump and then coincidentally getting a full pardon. And then he ran, I don't think that his infamy as a scammer would hurt him. If anything, that fame and name recognition would help. He could just lie and say he was framed and set up and yada yada and people would believe him.
True - I see what you mean. Well, I don't know if it's true, but I get the logic.
I inherently don't trust old white guys so i'm not sure that's true
Then you are sexist and racist, nothing to be proud of!
funny that no one said that to the parent comment that blindly speculated that holmes caused more sexism simply for being a woman
yet bring up the ruling class and that gets called out for sexism despite the endless string of fraud cases covered by those demographics
Thing is, SBF, Tate, and Paul aren't old (well, depends on your frame of reference I suppose); so even discriminating on age wouldn't help you much.
indeed one could find exceptions to every rule
You a vc?
heh
Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0].
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...
Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
It's a wider take on [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law):
- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.
- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.
- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.
- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'
I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder
Have you ever wondered the same about other scams? Who else do you think was shaped "correctly"? Also, isn't affinity fraud most types of fraud?
I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.
It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.
Word to wise entrepreneurs.
Somewhat relevant from The Economist.
> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...
Or the other way: The reason the scam was caught was because people were looking for flaws. Society gives a lot of grace to male scammers.
The scam was caught due to a whistleblower, not because people were looking for flaws.
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
He could have done this if he was from a more privileged background for sure.
>were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
> who clearly isn't a sociopath
Or is a sociopath, just not *clearly*.
Hot take: She is a genius.
Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company.
If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business.
The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
> The basic idea was and is unworkable.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
Same exact thought when this trailer came across my feed. "Oh, who did A24 get to play Holmes, she looks familiar somehow." hahaha
wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magic
After the complete mind melting of 2 seasons of "the rehearsal", this was my exact path too
Although I’m fully expecting actor shenanigans in the full documentary, I think the section in the trailer might actually be her for real
Love everything Nathan Fielder does. The trailer is awesome.
What an incredible trailer. So simple but so communicative and almost gave me goosebumps, very well made.
Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.
It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
You mean marketing and engineering.
Management and engineering.
Owners and employees
Capitalists and workers?
Worker and parasite?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
Capitalists are the ones who allocate - and risk - money to attempt to solve problems like this.
Yeah and we wish they would stop. Because solutions like this are something the system optimizes for.
Then we wouldn't have anything that's hard to create and/or requires risk.
Imagine claiming undue credit for the works of Euler, Einstein, Michaelangelo, and hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe, while disclaiming the constant bailouts from the taxpayer so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money, and being blinkered to the fact that 'money' doesn't solve hard problems or do hard things, workers do.
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money
If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail.
> Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
Bro it's a thread about Theranos just take the L
She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.
Marketing by definition is fraudulent because it is all about creating a fake need.
she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
I don't want to necessarily claim that Altman is worse than Holmes, but I don't think the rank order is entirely clear either.
An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
Elizabeth: my company will enable a full quick and cheap blood test from just a finger prick
Amodei: AI will cure cancer
Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.
If Sam Altman was actually named Elizabeth Altman the OpenAI CEO would be in jail.
People seem to forget that Sunny Balwani also went to prison over the Theranos fraud.
There are many issues with OpenAI but the two situations are pretty significantly different.
was about to reply, but... this has more layers than a (rotten) onion - I'll just restrain myself form doing so :P
And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
For those who are experts on body language, non-verbal communication, psychological communication tricks, etc -- what on earth are we seeing in that trailer?
After this, there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Perry of UBeam
Who’s “Bobby” mentioned in the article? Did the writer just mix up Billy Evans with Bobby?
It does seem that way, half-way through they switch from "Billy" to "Bobby"
"That’s part of its appeal — it’s a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus"
This is fable level unreadable to me
At least it's not opus level unreadable amirite?
Who is Bobby the article keeps talking about? Her business partner's name was Sunny, and her husband is Billy.
Bobby-Sunny=Billy
it's an embeddings things, you know
Fielder's "The Rehearsal" on HBO was madly brilliant.
In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
Elizabeth Holmes Thanksgiving Visit: Family Time in Prison
https://www.memesita.com/elizabeth-holmes-thanksgiving-visit...
And wtf is even a "prison camp?"
This looks like another homerun for a24
Imagine a world where we held Musk to the same standard as Holmes.
I get that musk frequently underdelivers and has gone insane recently, but what he’s done with spacex and Tesla is genuinely impressive. So I’m not sure what the hell do you mean, what exact standard?
Wow that is a one scary intense trailer. Hard to believe we are not witnessing some kind of serious psychopathology right there