At the zenith of its success, Holmes’s widely lauded brand as Silicon Valley’s corporate hero du jour carried the company to a $9 billion valuation and pulled in impossible sums from no less than the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, and Larry Ellison - also enabling her to forge ties with political and economic elites from across America. Dropping out of Stanford in her late teens to found Theranos, she seduced investors, politicians, and journalists alike by pitching a supposedly revolutionary technology that would enable medical tests to be carried out using only a few drops of blood drawn from the tiniest finger prick. What’s most striking about Holmes, who was this week found guilty of four charges in a much-publicized fraud trial, is less her final downfall than the astonishing length of time she was able to prosper on pure artifice.īy now, the details of Holmes’s story are well known.

(To writer Roger Parloff’s credit, he conceded the piece’s flaws the following year.)īut the parallels go much further than that, both cases ultimately being about the way sensational storytelling and personal mythmaking often come before reality in the respective cultures of the Beltway and Silicon Valley. A vegan, she long ago dropped coffee in favor of these juices, which, she finds, are better able to propel her through her 16-hour days and seven-day weeks. Her first of the day, it is made from spinach, parsley, wheatgrass, and celery. Holmes grips a plastic cup of unappetizing green juice. Revisit Fortune’s now equally infamous 2014 writeup on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and you’ll find the same basic schtick throughout, coupled with a similarly credulous appraisal of the figure at its center. Vanity Fair’s poorly aged depiction of O’Rourke, for example, expended countless paragraphs mythologizing mundane details about its subject’s tastes and personal biography (one particularly emblematic sentence read: “Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream”) while offering few tangible details about what he was actually running for president to do.

Some of these, of course, are at least partly about the fawning conventions of profile journalism. Nonetheless, pair a hagiographic portrait of a political figure (like the now-infamous March 2019 cover feature on Beto O’Rourke published by Vanity Fair) with its tech sector equivalent, and the parallels start to pile up pretty fast. Hucksterism, true enough, comes in many forms, and there’s plenty to differentiate the private version from the more public kind regularly churned out by both of America’s major political parties.

As someone who’s often made it my business to dive deep into the shallow bombast of centrist politicians, I feel an immediate sense of déjà vu whenever I’m tasked with writing about Silicon Valley.

Holmes about venture capitalism