You only have yourself to blame if you’re still somehow unaware of Elizabeth Holmes and the undeniably bonkers story of Theranos. If you’re looking to catch up to the rest of us, however, check into HBO’s The Inventor, which does a fine job of breaking down the Silicon Valley debacle. The Alex Gibney-directed exposé will give you an intimate look at the fraud knowingly perpetrated by Holmes, not to mention her many unsettling eccentricities. It’s such a creep-show that Vulture’s put together a collection of GIFs from the documentary that encapsulate just how unnerving a watch it is.
With her signature black turtle neck, wide, frightened deer eyes, and affected, baritone voice, Holmes could have easily been cast as a late-90s Bond villain. Instead, she was the darling of Silicon Valley, where she convinced investors to dump millions of dollars into an invention that had little to no support from the scientific community. Her personal lack of scientific knowledge didn’t stop Holmes—who dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos—from posing awkwardly with vaguely scientific materials.
But the moment in the film that goes beyond creepy, straight into pure farce, and then back to creepy again comes towards the end, when Holmes and the Theranos staff celebrate the fact that the FDA approved one of the company’s blood tests. How do you celebrate one of the great scams on tech history? With a little MC Hammer, of course.
The GIF possibilities are truly endless in this film, ensuring that we’ll be staring into Elizabeth Holmes’ dead eyes for years to come.
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89 Comments
This is exactly what we deserve.
My theory is Trump has already obliterated the world, and we’re all dead and this is hell and we just don’t know it.
Just seeing her employees dance convinces me that she should be in prison.
Nah, it was the Y2K what got us.
How do you explain Nü Metäl, Nickelback (two discreet torments), the Adam Levine/Maroon 5 bedevilments, AND just about everything else since 2000?And yes, we are most certainly in some form of hell. Seriously.
If you’re right, it means I died a virgin working the New Year’s shift at the local megaplex.
Were you wearing wraparound shades and baggy jeans, while wondering where the current season of Shasta McNasty was going next?
If yes it’s still better than my 2K death. Sneaking a bowl in the woods of my jerk girlfriend’s family cabin in rural Wisconsin. Her parents were there, too. It was…appropriately depressing.
Really? Smoking weed sounds a lot better than cleaning popcorn grease at a concession counter in suburban Kansas
Lol I’ve done both. I worked at a second-run theater in a Detroit suburb. Generally, yes, weed is better. But this was Chicago weed, which was trash. I’m friends with her now, but that GF was not great, and her parents being there made it even worse. Really cramped my drug-and-drinking binge I’d been cultivating to deal with having a crap hipster GF, to say nothing of the -10F cold I was forced to smoke in. I would work box, concession, and proj all at once during a Toy Story opening day before I do that shit again.Being that this is now hell, I probably will.
I wish I shared your optimism.
Apologies, as I am not an American white male, I disagree with your statement.
[FARTS]
What does this have to do with the male nipple exposure on the review for the Relaxer?
Elizabeth Holmes is the spawn of an unholy union between Steve Jobs and Malibu Barbie
She’s just a fucking hack.
Nah. She’s a conman. A very skilled one considering how carefully she tailored her image to appeal to her marks. Consider her much mocked copying of Steve Jobs’ look. Kind of brilliant. A sneaky way to flatter the old white men she was getting money out of. It basically said, “I’m a pretty girl and I know that the highest thing I can aspire to is be like Jobs. Your god who you secretly see yourself in.”
And some sort of Hobbit-like creature, as well.
Man, rich people are fucking stupid, and Elizabeth Holmes knows that.Gotta admit: She had the balls to bamboozle two war criminals, Rupert Murdoch, The Waltons, Betsy Devos and James Mattis. And as a former employee of Seeking Arrangements, I can say that Holmes played the sugar game very well with Sunny Balwani.I mean, her dad worked for Enron. She definitely built a bamboozle network up from there.And now she’s getting married to a hotel heir with a husky of her own even with the fact that she may or may not go to jail. Man, I wish was born rich so that I can find other rich people stupid enough to buy into my scheme because my dad was rich and end up with a rich consolation fiancee in the end.
Wait, are you saying that Holmes and Balwani met on a sugar daddy website? Or are you implying that working for one gives you the expertise to spot a sugar relationship?
I’m saying that she played “the sugar game” 100%. I’m not saying that she uses SA.And yeah, I work in the marketing dept. for SA. So I do know a bit about sugar relationships.
Expert opinion, then. Thanks for clarifying!
Huh?
Um, it’s a WOLF, dude.
shes like a stoned Yael Grobglas doing a Bea Arthur impression
You can tell she watched Keanu Reeves performance in ‘Bill & Ted’, and then, imitated his voice exactly, my dudes.
I met her once at a SV party.I’m still terrified of her big eyes and low voice.
She’s like a Universal Horror monster, as it were, old sport.
Diversity. Good for us.
Yeah, that’s why they have so much of it in Israel.
But remember, friendship is like stealing.
+1 Weaponized Pumpkin
A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? The complete and total shittiness of Kinja making it impossible to right-click and save these gifs for later use. That’s what’s cool.
Right-click, “open video in new tab,” CTRL-S. They’re not gifs, they’re MP4s.
I don’t want them to be MP4s. I want them to be gifs. My point about Kinja sucking ass stands.‘Check out this sweet MP4 I found!’ See, nobody says that.
Eh, I mean, Kinja sucks for a number of obvious reasons, but I don’t think in this case we can blame the platform for the writers’ choice to use MP4s instead of GIFs.
Is the title of the article ‘Stare into the void with these Mp4s of Elizabeth Holmes’?No, it is not.
Sure, but that’s still a fuckup by the writers/editors, not a problem with Kinja per se. I DEMAND THAT YOUR CRITICISMS BE PRECISE.
No, it’s fucking not. When you paste a gif into Kinja, it converts it into an MP4. See? I just did it.
WHAT THE FUCKOk, mea culpa, I had no idea they did that. I’ve pasted tons of gifs into comments before and I could swear they stayed as gifs, but maybe they changed that at some point?Anyway, I throw myself upon your mercy, please don’t pillage my homeland, etc.
DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GAMEBuckle up, motherfucker.
Wait, this isn’t Parcheesi?
This exceedingly creepy and off-putting person (and her successful grift) is living proof that the rich did not get where they are through superior intellect or ability. Seriously, just from looking at her and hearing her talk I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.
It’s like an AI system that just didn’t get it put her together and said, “yeah, she’ll be relatable.”
Gotta admit, this isn’t terribly interesting.
Now I’m imagining her as the shittiest Bond villain ever, and the quip Bond would inevitably make as she falls into a vat of contaminated blood/is crushed by boxes of titrators/is blown up by an exploding gene sequencer:“How bloodcurdling.”“A pity she couldn’t test for that.”“She won’t be offering refunds.”
The tragic tale of a British civil servant’s struggles with alcohol.
“James? should we check that Holmes definitely died when her factory exploded?”“No need, my dear; Theranos-urvivors.”
As actually looking into this story, I’ve only seen the documentary. Counterpoint: she believed in her own bullshit and lied to people thinking that eventually Theranos would get there; not that she made up a fake technology to grift people all along.
Basically, from what I can tell it’s the hubris of the ultra-privileged that made her think she could create a biotech company with essentially zero knowledge of medicine or technology; she clearly believed someone like Steve Jobs made Apple huge only through charisma and fake-it-til-you-make-it assery. Mind boggling that it actually worked for 10-something years thanks to getting dumbfuck rich old men to give her money.
“she clearly believed someone like Steve Jobs made Apple huge only through charisma and fake-it-til-you-make-it assery.”So, she forgot to get a Wozniak to handle the rest?
Yeah, totally, but while Jobs was clearly the showman/front man forcing others to do the heavy, he at least had a background in the tech he was slinging.
I really hate to bring him up (seriously), but it’s extremely relevant – this sort of thing is how a frighteningly large amount of “high finance” happens.Trump. Divorce the last few years of potential psychotic dementia and stick to his business career. It’s a long list of him being in over his head in a continuing escalating pile of failures, but still knowing how to pull the right strings to keep someone – Daddy, investors, Deutsch Bank – shoveling money in to the pit.
I listened to the ABC podcast on this loon (“The Dropout”). One of the quotes from the podcast, from one of the old white dudes on her board, was pretty telling
Don Lucas Sr., one of the first investors to back the blood-testing company. In a clip from an oral-history interview from 2009, Lucas explained that he assumed his initial conversation with Holmes would be a short one — she had no formal background in business, and for this reason he found it quite “presumptuous” of Holmes to think she could be president of a biotech company.But, as he tells it, he quickly changed his tune when he became aware of some important distinctions about her: “Her great-grandfather was an entrepreneur, very successful. And it turned out later that the hospital [near] where [her family] lives is named after her great-uncle.” In Lucas’s mind, she had the two necessary qualifications to start Theranos — a family with history in both business and medicine.By being white and having a great-grandfather businessman and an great-uncle in medicine, Miss Holmes was deemed qualified to run a healthcare company. This is why mediocre white people get chance after chance.
Only reason I even commented on this was from ABC’s podcast giving me a little more insight about the insanity. Just binged it all yesterday and this morning.
Ok Don Lucas, Jr.:1- business acumen is probably not genetic. Great-Grandfather…?
2- your name on a building does not mean you know anything about what goes on in that building – Does he think David Geffen knows anything about medicine (or theater)?Some people are just begging to be taken advantage of.
The Gibney documentary zooms in tight towards the end to focus on the sociocultural forces of Silicon Valley that seem to foster that fake-it-til-you-make-it mindset.The reason medicine has been largely resistant to Valley tech innovation being that the institution is by and large, highly risk-averse. The existing diagnostics market is dominated by only a handful of players – large manufacturers, and a couple of mega-conglomerate testing labs.There’s a reason Theranos approached Chiat-Day for their marketing and PR: That damn 1984 Orwellian Macintosh campaign. They even threw out Ridley Scott’s name as a possible hire.From the outside diagnostics can very readily appear like the kind of stagnant, slow-moving industry ripe for Valley-style disruption. The knowledge-base that Elizabeth lacks, that Phyllis Gardner just couldn’t get through to her, comes from understanding the historic forces that have shaped how the present ecosystem of payors and regulators and manufacturers evolved.
If you get the time you should read the book or listen to the podcast. It was VERY obvious that she knew it was all fake. The HBO docu was kind of disappointing, IMO.
I didn’t mean she didn’t know the technology wasn’t working. She knew that and lied that it was and accepted more money from investors knowing that. I meant that even if she had the intention of being a billionaire first and then thought up of the Theranos idea, I think she still believed that she and her company could actually make the product. I mean it wouldn’t make sense for her to hire all those people to work long and hard hours, and for her to do the same, if she knew that it really couldn’t be done and she was intentionally wasting all those peoples’ times just so she could get rich. Remember she had the idea of a time machine as a kid and an antibiotic patch her advisor, Gardner, said wasn’t possible. So with the drop of blood lab machine, she came up with a foolish idea she thought she could make work even if it wasn’t possible. The story works better as a tale of incredible hubris than setting out to just scam people only for money.
Sorry, Kinja’s been funky for me the past few days and won’t let me edit. I mean that I don’t believe she set out to only grift people to get rich by coming up with an idea she knew from the beginning couldn’t be done just so that she could get rich, like a two-bit con artist. She wanted to become rich but she also thought—without any medical and engineering training—that she could build the product and change the world. The megalomania was very strong.
She’s as obvious a fraud as Jussie Smollett, and believed by the same people, for the same reason.
All the rightwingers she scammed believed Smollett? Really?
She’s a regular Hari Kondabolu, let’s face it.
Henry Kissinger believed Jussie Smollett?
Elizabeth Holmes is a great big silly head. It is elementary, my dear Watson. *puffs pipe*
I tried to watch this. Couldn’t get past the stare and the affectation.
Read the book by the Wall Street Journal reporter that busted the whole scam wide open… Much more enjoyable and no risk of going Bird Box after looking into her eyes for too long
She’s basically Elon Musk if Elon was a blonde lady.
If you think for a second that all those war criminals and old white Republicans on her board didn’t take one look at her think, ‘Hmm, I wonder what the best way to wrest control of this thing from her in a few years would be,’ you are out of your mind. Hell, that guy Sunny probably had the right idea – give her money and then get her in bed.From what I can tell, her tactics were far more Trumpian than Jobs-ian. She lied for as long as she had to get where she had to be, she doubled down on those lies at every opportunity, she bullied people, she threatened people, she took money she had no right taking, she piggybacked on the word of otherwise trustworthy people she conned by telling them what they wanted to hear, she’s basically responsible for at least one death (you know Trump has had someone killed at some point, or at least been involved in someone’s death), the list goes on and on. Her time at Theranos also mirrors Trump’s administration in the way that she basically just did all the greatest hits of being a CEO. She dressed how those people dressed, talked how those people talked, lied how those people lie, etc. Trump does the same thing. He shuts down the government, he fires missiles at some country of brown people, he makes some half-assed effort at doing something the previous President didn’t, he offers up tiny tidbits of cooperation when the cameras are rolling and then backstabs those very same people the minute that they’re off. She playacted at being a CEO in the same way that Trump playacts at being a President. It’s the very same thing.Also, for a woman who drinks nothing but green juice, her face certainly is quite puffy.
I think Trump managed to actually build a few buildings that served their purpose as buildings. Hardly reinventing the wheel, but then that’s another difference between his persona & hers.
Not every subcontractor got paid, but hey…
Yup, different people being ripped off in these cases.
The impression I got from the Carreyrou book being that Elizabeth’s tragic flaw was getting lost in the limn between vision and delusion.For my money, the most difficult part to parse – and it’s not clear to me anyone but Holmes and Balwani know, and even they’re probably deluded on the subject themselves – is how much of that delusion was her doing or his enabling.On the flipside, the ends-justify-the-means rationalization that seems to be going on, it seems like Sunny takes the lion’s share of the blame. But it’s perfectly reasonable to also suppose that she sent him to do the ugly stuff to keep her own image as angelically squeaky clean as possible.Their relationship, profession and personal, I’ve been finding the most intriguing. Something about their specific pathology feels like the product of synergy (he said, in a Veridian Dynamics vo). Like – Elizabeth would have her low-key delusions of grandeur and affectations without Sunny, and Sunny would probably be a modestly sociopathic bully no matter what.But it’s not hard to imagine that their unique mutually complementary combination in these specific circumstances was some sort of operatic pathology that neither could ever achieve on their own.
I like that. Like some shit-universe version of Lennon and McCartney. They certainly did feed off each other, and provided one another with all the things they couldn’t get on their own. Theranos was tanking hard when Sunny stepped in, and without his sunshine money, she never would’ve gotten as far as she did with everyone else she pulled into her circle. Why they started fucking is anyone’s guess, but if you ask me, she was young and impressionable, he was older and filthy rich, yadda yadda. Yet another terrible thing they did that they never even should’ve considered doing.But yeah, I do agree that neither one of them really seem to even know themselves if they were deliberately conning people, or if they just got caught up in the endless stream of lies and intimidation and everything else that they just persisted on throwing at everyone they could find. They had to keep doing it because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had to wait for someone to expose them. At the rate they were going, they were well on their way to doing just that themselves.Disclosure, I haven’t read the book or seen the HBO doc yet. But goddamn, that podcast was incredible. And lordy, I cannot WAIT to see what Adam McKay and J-Law do with this. There will be blood.
Disclosure, I haven’t read the book or seen the HBO doc yet. But goddamn, that podcast was incredible.FWIW, the Carreyrou book and Gibney documentary pull from largely the same sources. The Elizabeth Vargas 20/20 feature, based on the podcast was a little more scattershot in organization, but similarly relied on sources pulled largely from Carreyrou’s reporting. Carreyrou, for my money, I think of as the authoritative source, by virtue of his reporting essentially being the volta in Theranos’ story. The journalistic aspect of the book feels a little muddied by the author foregrounding himself in the narrative; but it serves as a critical lens through which to view David Boies and associates’ legal assault.In the alternate timeline in the Theranos-verse where Edison actually worked, that kind of journalistic self-aggrandizement might not be viewed particularly favorably. But of the many themes that Carreyrou threads through Bad Blood, the confluence of conspiratorial secrecy and paranoia in the hypercapitalist culture of Silicon Valley is a telling glimpse into the other tech giants only tangentially referenced throughout. But yeah, I do agree that neither one of them really seem to even know themselves if they were deliberately conning people, or if they just got caught up in the endless stream of lies and intimidation and everything else that they just persisted on throwing at everyone they could find. This is where I find that Gibney and Vargas get to outshine Carreyrou – by including snippets from Elizabeth and Sunny’s depositions. The amount of dissembling ignorance on Holmes’ part is astounding – even if you still somehow believed in her general commitment to her vision, the endgoal of democratizing access to diagnostic laboratory testing, the sheer volume of how little she claimed to know or understand operations within her own company is astounding, and certainly speaks to her ineptitude as a leader who should at a bare minimum, have a broad and general understanding of the processes at work in a company she not only founded and headed, but was legally responsible for.In contrast, Sunny’s curt, relative transparency feels refreshingly honest, only by comparison.
So do you think that Holmes really didn’t know all those times she said ‘I don’t know’ in her deposition? I got the feeling she was playing dumb for a lot of it, but yeah, I guess if you don’t even understand your own product, there’s not a whole lot you could actually know. She had no real training for any of what she claimed to be doing. But I guess that’s what happens when you insist upon making yourself both the public face AND the genius behind your magical product – you have to be doubly responsible when it comes crashing down.I watched the HBO doc on a plane the other day, and I really think that in the end, it went pretty easy on her. The trial and sentencing will tell a whole lot more of her story, of course, but just the fact that she’s out there right now, living her life with a brand-new rich fiance’ kinda makes me sick. She put a lot of innocent people’s lives at stake, and besides all the imaginary money she ‘lost’, she seems to be dodging a lot of consequence for it. For now, anyway. If she gets off, then Silicon Valley is as irreparably broken as any of the old-school industries it once sought to disrupt or replace.
I am truly ashamed to admit that I am very physically attracted to Elizabeth Holmes. Also, I’m entirely convinced that she is an android designed specifically to manipulate and control human beings, particularly men. Help.
You are not alone.
She definitely has a creepy-hot vibe, but God, those uncanny valley eyes… *shiver*
I looked at the first gif which is oddly hypnotic then looked at my cat who was sat on the edge of the computer desk. He took one look at me and shot off under the bed.
Here’s her plan.1. Con everyone with the intent of getting caught. Collect Millions.2. If caught, double down on lies. Collect more millions. 3. Hide funds in many places.4. When caught, hire lawyers with acquired millions.5. If convicted, ride the time out peacefully. Collect millions upon parole.6. If acquitted, then back to step 1. 7. Either way, hire a writer to tell your side of the story. Collect more money.
She never cashed in any of her stock.
No need. So much salary. No waiting for IPO.
I hear her speak and I immediately think of The Venture Bros.’ Dr. Mrs the Monarch (née Dr. Girlfriend), but then I remember that Dr. the Mrs. is actually pretty competent at what she does. This chick, maybe not so much.
Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is a total badass.
Sometimes that woman, she looks right into ya. Right into
your eyes. Y’know the thing
about her, she’s got… lifeless
eyes, pale blue glassy eyes, like a
doll’s eyes. When she comes at
ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’… until she steals all your investment capital.
Somewhere Kate McKinnon is practicing speaking in her deepest voice.
that last gif is all like
A CAPSULE THAT CONTAINED SUCH POWER
AOC has that same look but you don’t seem to notice. Or maybe you’re just selective and pushing an agenda. Don’t bother, I already know which it is.
No one’s eyes are more uncanny valley than AOC but Holmes comes close.