He is a crazy mix of clowns, geniuses, leaders, visionaries, industrialists, performers, scoundrels; Edison (inventor), Barnum (the father of modern PR), Carnegie (entrepreneur), and Dr. Manhattan (a superhero, scientist in DC Comics).
This is time magazine's description of Elon Musk in the 2021 People of the Year awards.
Turning back the clock a few years, such an assessment appeared almost unchanged on another Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Dropping out of Stanford University at the age of 19, she turned an idea she germinated in her dorm room into a product, taking the helm of a nearly 10 billion-dollar tech company;
She always wears a black sweater with a high collar, is a workaholic, perfectionist, and has been selected by Time magazine as one of the top 100 influential people in the world;
When she is questioned by the media, she will respond confidently and dismissively on TV shows: "When you want to change the world, some people will target you like this." 」
These stories you should not be unfamiliar with, it is simply a mixture of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, ZuckerBerg, Musk and other entrepreneurs, if there is a person who can gather the souls of so many geniuses in one, what kind of unborn genius will it be?
She, however, is the protagonist of the biggest scam in the history of Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth once launched a "revolutionary blood test device", claiming that more than 300 blood tests can be completed through fingertip blood collection alone, and the blood has become gold, and she has become the brightest star in Silicon Valley.
All this was eventually discovered to be a hoax, and such a skyscraper that was picked up by capital, the media, and the public collapsed.
After several years of trials, the California District Court recently found Elizabeth on four counts of investor fraud, although the judge has not yet announced the final sentence, each of which can be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison, meaning elizabeth, 37, may spend the rest of her life in prison. (Some legal experts are not expected to impose the maximum sentence.)
Become the "Female Version of Jobs"
Elizabeth's calling herself the "female version of Jobs" is not unreasonable.
In middle school, Elizabeth showed a genius side, has maintained an all-A grade, and at the age of 17 was admitted to the prestigious Stanford University, and also received a monthly research funding of 3,000 US dollars, began to embark on the road of scientific research.
Elizabeth lectured at Pepperdine University
Channing Robertson, dean of stanford engineering school, is Elizabeth's Bole, and she makes an exception for Elizabeth, a freshman, to work with her phD students in the lab.
During the summer of her freshman year, Elizabeth entered the laboratory of the Singapore Genome Research Centre at the time of SARS abuse, and Elizabeth was responsible for testing the SARS virus in blood samples.
After returning from Singapore, Elizabeth applied for her first patent, a wearable drug injection patch, which surprised President Channing. The following year Elizabeth decided to drop out of school to start a business, and Dean Channing not only supported her decision, but also personally served as a board advisor to her company.
The company Elizabeth founded was called Theranos, a combination of the English words "therapy" and "diagnosis," which was directed toward doing trace blood tests, that is, testing multiple indicators with just one drop of blood.
At this point in the story, you may see the growth trajectory of Jobs and Bill Gates. In fact, Elizabeth is a big fan of Jobs, and almost everywhere in the entrepreneurial process is Based on Jobs as a template.
Like Jobs, Elizabeth wore the same black turtleneck sweater and slacks in public, and in order to match the dress, Elizabeth asked the company's air conditioning temperature to be maintained at 15.5 degrees Celsius for many years.
She also deliberately imitated Jobs's deep baritone voice when speaking, and in the HBO documentary, several former Theranos employees suspected that Elizabeth's voice was fake, because her real voice was heard when she occasionally slipped and got drunk.
Elizabeth seems to want to emulate Jobs and establish a maverick freak image, a very popular person in Silicon Valley, and now Elon Musk is one of them.
Elon Musk
So it's no surprise that "changing the world" became Elizabeth's mantra. When the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report questioning Theranos, she responded on the TV show this way:
That's what happens to someone who wants to change the world. They start by saying you're crazy, then they start hitting you, and you end up changing the world.
Although Elizabeth did not change the world in the end, her personal brand image was successful, and she seemed to really have marketing ability comparable to Jobs, with strong storytelling skills.
She emotionally told her original intention on TED, to let people like her who are afraid of needles better receive treatment, not to delay treatment like her uncle because they can't afford expensive testing costs, "The people we love will change, the whole medical system, the world will change." 」
What is even more rare is that Elizabeth also successfully won over a vote of political and business tycoons to stand for herself.
At the time, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed her as U.S. Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, and on Theranos' board of directors, two former U.S. secretaries of state, former U.S. secretaries of defense, former chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee, former admirals and former Marine Corps generals, former Secretary of State George Shultz, publicly stated:
This girl, the next Jobs, is the next Bill Gates.
At first glance, Theranos' board of directors looks like a small cabinet, and interestingly, as a medtech startup, the board doesn't have anyone with a medical background.
At a time when Theranos was being questioned, Media Tycoon Murdoch, known for his investment streaks, invested $125 million in Theranos, which was once valued at $9 billion and Elizabeth's personal worth more than $4 billion.
The influx of media began to hail Elizabeth on the altar, With Forbes naming her "the world's youngest self-made female billionaire", Time magazine nominating her as "100 Most Influential People of 2015", Fortune voting her "Businessman of the Year", and Inc's cover title "The Next Jobs"...
Why Elizabeth has been favored by so many celebrities and the media, Erika Cheung, who worked as a lab assistant at Theranos, said her answer in the documentary:
It's hard to understand her, but I adore her. Because she is a woman who entered the field of science and technology and started her own company, she is a very ideal idol.
Cheung's answer is very representative, after all, in the male-dominated Silicon Valley, there are very few female founders who can turn the company into a unicorn with their own technology, and investors, media and even the American people need such stories.
A drop of blood turns into gold, and a drop of blood burns $1.4 billion
According to Elizabeth's vision, her product can immediately test more than 200 physical indicators as long as one or two drops of blood are collected, and she hopes that patients with needlephobia like her can easily and quickly complete the physical examination.
If this idea is realized, it will completely subvert the medical testing industry, knowing that a drop of blood is only one thousandth of the amount of blood collected by the hospital's routine examination, and the hospital needs 1-2 days to get the test results. Even more impressive, Elizabeth reduced the cost of the hospital's $50 blood test to $2.99.
This means that Theranos is expected to replace 70% of the business of the US medical testing industry, which has an annual revenue of about 73 billion yuan in 2017, which has become a strong figure for Elizabeth to attract investors.
However, after burning out $1.4 billion in financing, Theranos ended up building an instrument that could detect only a few metrics and had a very high error rate.
Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published "Bad Blood: The Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Giant", details of Theranos' product development and counterfeiting, and the original whistleblower was Theranos' former laboratory director.
Perhaps because the imitation of Jobs is too deep, Elizabeth is very stubborn about creating the "perfect product". Because the amount of blood in one drop is really difficult to meet the needs of the laboratory test, the team once suggested increasing the amount of blood collected, but Elizabeth firmly opposed it, and also fired the product owner.
Elizabeth was not at all upset about spending the money, and the $200 blood cartridge was scrapped once, and hundreds of them could be used a week. But the product has not been up to the standard, and the market has detected 31 indicators of competitors in 12 minutes, elizabeth finally moved the idea of counterfeiting.
In order to win the order of Walgreen, the largest chain of pharmacies in the United States, Elizabeth actually boasted that her products can complete more than 300 tests and even screen for cancer, in fact, Theranos' only product, Edison, can only detect a few indicators.
If you tell one lie, you have to tell more lies to round it up. In order to cope with the testing in the Walgreen store, Elizabeth spent a lot of money to buy a number of large Siemens testing instruments, and sent the blood drawn in the store back to the laboratory to be tested with Siemens instruments.
The Siemens testing instrument weighs 1200 kg
However, Siemens' instruments can not solve the problem of insufficient blood collection, coupled with improper blood preservation during the transportation process, the test results are still unreliable, and the so-called "accurate and rapid detection of more than 300 indicators of one drop of blood" has not been achieved.
Faced with substandard test results, sunny Balwani, the company's COO and Elizabeth's boyfriend at the time, would directly ask employees to remove "anomalous data" from the test.
Theranos has blood collection stations in 40 Walgreen stores
In the results of the survey later released by the FDA of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, only 12 of Theranos' 250 tests were completed by its own product, Edison, and almost none of the only 12 test results were accurate.
The earlier mention of Theranos' board of directors having no medical background at all, and the fact that a venture capital firm focused on the biotech sector invested in Theranos, is actually a bit of a problem.
The book "Bad Blood" mentions that many pharmaceutical institutions and industry insiders have found out early that Theranos' technology is not reliable. When Walgreen decided to work with Theranos, his lab consultant, Kevin Hunter, questioned it, and Theranos refused Kevin Hunt's request to visit the lab on grounds of confidentiality.
Elizabeth even set up a temporary laboratory to invite then Vice President Biden to visit.
Unfortunately, Walgreen did not heed Kevin Hunter's advice, signed a $50 million purchase order without verification, and renovated the store for the placement of Theranos equipment, all of which were finally lost.
In fact, not much of the $1.4 billion Theranos received was actually spent on product development, much of it was spent on Elizabeth's lavish lifestyle and expensive attorneys' fees.
According to an article in Vanity Fair, Theranos headquarters costs $1 million a month and a conference table for $100,000, and before 2017 Elizabeth rented a private jet on a business trip, and was also equipped with a dedicated security team, personal chef, assistant, driver and public relations, with a monthly personal cost of up to $25,000.
After the scam was revealed, Both Elizabeth and her boyfriend faced multiple lawsuits for alleged fraud, and it is reported that their lawyers are paid for millions of dollars per month, all of which are paid by Theranos.
Elizabeth and her lawyer arrive in federal court
And there are as many as nine law firms that have litigated Elizabeth and Theranos, including David Boies, a star lawyer who represented Microsoft in antitrust cases, and he is one of the most expensive lawyers in the field of intellectual property in the United States.
Investors' money was lost, the punched media turned their faces and did not recognize anyone, Forbes valued Elizabeth's personal value to zero, Fortune magazine called her "the world's most disappointing leader", and the "female version of Jobs" completely collapsed.
Elizabeth fell from the altar, the end of an era
In fact, in September 2018, Theranos has officially ceased operations, awaiting a series of lawsuits from various parties by Elizabeth.
However, due to the large number of investors and users involved, it takes a lot of time just to sort out the information, and the 2019 documents of the US Department of Justice show that as many as 16 million to 17 million pages of files need to be sorted out.
Elizabeth faced a total of 11 lawsuits, which were later postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Elizabeth's pregnancy and childbirth, and only recently reopened the trial, and after 7 days of trial, the jury convicted Elizabeth of 4 counts, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of telecommunications fraud against investors, and 4 counts of non-conviction, and 3 counts of which have not yet been decided.
Image credit: Associated Press
In the years when Theranos was in full swing, the device that claimed to "disrupt the medical system" almost led to tragedy.
A pregnant woman who had a miscarriage while the fetus was healthy began taking medications that could harm the fetus. A healthy person was misdiagnosed as AIDS, and he spent a lot of money to worry about it, and there are countless similar oolongs.
Elizabeth, who doesn't seem to consider herself a liar, admitted in court that some of Theranos' operations were problematic, but insisted she never deliberately deceived investors and patients.
Interestingly, even if Elizabeth's scam has basically been conclusive, there are already some fans who imitate Elizabeth's iconic dress at the trial site, and in a way she may be a marketing genius.
The reason why Elizabeth's scam has not been discovered for more than a decade is that in addition to her excellent marketing skills and media, it also depends on Theranos requiring each employee to sign a very strict confidentiality agreement, because most employees are silent about everything they see for fear of facing high compensation.
This also made it more difficult for media interviews, and Alex Gibney, director of HBO documentaries, also said that during the filming process, it was affected by confidentiality agreements, and it was not easy to obtain video footage and interviews with internal employees in Theranos.
Another former executive close to Elizabeth said she considered herself a victim and blamed the incompetence of her legal team for the status quo, saying she had a way of convincing a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist that although Theranos' technology was not yet mature, it would eventually change the world.
Elizabeth's story seems to be full of accidents, but such a figure in today's Internet companies is not unfamiliar. Cases like Theranos, which lack strong and standardized internal controls and management processes, have led to the misuse of financing by founders are not uncommon among former star companies such as Ofo and LeEco.
Alex Gibney, the director of HBO's documentary, also expressed a similar view, pointing out that many Silicon Valley people think that Theranos is not the real side of Silicon Valley, but in fact, the Silicon Valley giants are also lying to the public, Apple is hiding the truth about the aging battery and reducing the frequency, and Facebook and Google are abusing users' private data.
The New York Times commented after Elizabeth's conviction that the verdict marked the end of an era in which silicon valley entrepreneurs' once-secret "Fake it till you make it" rule would be broken.
Apple has earlier announced that it will make this ups and downs story into a movie, and Hollywood actress "Big Cousin" Jennifer Lawrence will play Elizabeth.
Unfortunately, neither the "Bad Blood" nor the HBO documentary interviewed Elizabeth herself, and the director and producer of the HBO documentary spent 5 hours convincing Elizabeth to accept the interview, but was eventually rejected.
Elizabeth once left this sentence:
When we get back on our feet, you can see the success of Theranos.
Click "Watching"
It is the greatest motivation for us