“Throughout the very public rise and fall of the blood testing startup Theranos, the company’s young founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was never shy about declaring Steve Jobs her role model,” Stephen Silver writes for AppleInsider. “Like Jobs, Holmes dropped out of college and set off for Silicon Valley with dreams of making products that changed the world. Like Jobs, Holmes founded a tech company at an uncommonly young age. Like Jobs, Holmes spoke with a deep voice and favored black turtlenecks. In 2015, Holmes appeared on the cover of the business magazine Inc., next to the words ‘The Next Steve Jobs.'”
“Unlike Jobs, however, Holmes wasn’t able to actually create a product that could change the world,” Silver writes. “Or even one that worked at all.”
Elizabeth Holmes has surrendered to the FBI and faces 20 years in prison. A long way down from this @Inc cover a few years back..https://t.co/AwEwmeCsVJ pic.twitter.com/q0f5ugfs9e
— Natalie Novick (@nnovick) June 16, 2018
“Not long after that magazine cover, Theranos’ product was proven as a fraud, and Holmes and her company president/romantic partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted last month on federal charges, with Holmes herself facing nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
“Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, an acclaimed, bestselling new book by John Carreyrou — the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of the company’s fraud — delivers the blow-by-blow of Theranos’ making and unmaking,” Silver writes. “And it also shows that Apple had an even greater influence on Theranos than originally thought.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs didn’t really speak in a deep voice, but he had several world-changing products of substance.
Elizabeth Holmes proves that marketing and salesmanship (RDF) can only take you so far.
Steve Jobs’ RDF worked because he was actually distorting reality, shifting paradigms multiple times like the white-hot, spellbinding genius he was.