The white wolf with empty gloves is not new, but you can imagine that someone actually used a drop of blood to play three US presidents and a group of business elites, and by the way, harvested billions of dollars in net worth and cut the leeks of 300 million Americans.
This man, Elizabeth Holmes, was once known as the female version of Jobs, because everything was a hoax, and when she was finally exposed, she was ruined and faced 20 years in prison. So, what's the story? Let's talk about it today.
Female college students successfully start their own business
Elizabeth's family is illustrious, her ancestors are the founders of Cincinnati General Hospital and the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, her grandfather is a top student at West Point, and her parents hold important positions in the US government.
However, Elizabeth grew up listening to the stories of her ancestors' entrepreneurship, and spent her childhood with her parents in Houston, Washington, D.C., and overseas.
The parents thought she wanted to be the president of the United States, but who knew that the daughter shook her head and denied: "I don't want to be president, I just want to make more money and become a billionaire." ”
In order to be better able to do business abroad in the future, Elizabeth began to learn Chinese at a young age. At the beginning of this century, the bioengineering industry was very hot, and he set his goal early on to be admitted to Stanford University to major in bioengineering.
Later, Elizabeth was admitted to Stanford as she wished, and was also appreciated by Professor Channing Robertson, associate dean of the School of Bioengineering.
With this industry leader on her side, she was able to master many cutting-edge technologies and cutting-edge achievements in the industry, and in the summer of 2003, she was offered an internship at the Genomics Institute of Singapore.
At the time of the SARS epidemic, Elizabeth took the opportunity to participate in a research project on virus testing, and it was this internship that completely changed the trajectory of her life.
The complicated and boring testing process made Elizabeth have a thought: how great would it be if a sensitive and fast detection machine could be invented that could detect the SARS virus and all blood indicators at the same time?
The more she thinks about it, the more she feels reliable, the more she thinks about it, the more impulsive she becomes, this kind of machine can not only subvert the industry's perception of blood testing and benefit the world, but also make her a lot of money.
After flying back to the United States from Singapore, she locked herself in her room for five days and five nights, and finally found a way to combine the research results of this project with chip sensing technology to design a more convenient and faster blood testing device.
Elizabeth told Professor Channing about the idea, who felt that his student was a genius and helped her refine the idea and successfully obtained a patent.
She seemed to see countless banknotes beckoning to her, and then told Professor Channing: "Professor, I want to drop out of school and start a business in the sea, and use my new invention to shock the world." ”
The professor was stupid, and immediately shook his head in opposition and persuaded her bitterly: "I have worked in more than 40 companies, and none of them are female college students as heads. ”
Far from convincing Elizabeth to change her mind, the kind old man put himself in the shoes and promised the latter to be the company's chief advisor.
In May of the following year, Elizabeth went to Silicon Valley to officially found Real-time Theranos, a company whose start-up talent was supported by Professor Qian Ning, and what was most lacking now was financial support.
For Elizabeth, who has a good girlfriend named Jessie Draper, whose father is Tim Draper, the "godfather of Silicon Valley venture capital", is the back-up of giant companies such as Tesla, Baidu, Skype and Hotmail.
There is such a relationship that Elizabeth successfully got the opportunity to sell herself, and it stands to reason that a big guy like Tim Draper is experienced and will not be interested in this kind of unsuccessful project, but I have to admit that Elizabeth is really sharp-tongued,
What "microfluidic control chip", "nanotechnology" and other professional words flickered, and actually defrauded $1 million in start-up capital with a 26-page proposal.
Seeing that the godfather of venture capital had paid for it, and there was also Qian Ning, a medical tycoon, as an endorsement, they took out the funds in their pockets.
It didn't take long for Elizabeth to raise $6 million in investment and become a pig on the cusp. In the B round of investment, the founder of Oracle sent another $9 million to completely solve the funding problem.
A drop of blood fools the world
Elizabeth had a radical idea to completely disrupt the existing industry and create a portable, networked inspection device.
As long as a drop of blood can detect more than 200 indicators, determine all the conditions of the patient, and then provide the perfect treatment plan according to the condition, notify the doctor or automatically administer medication to the patient.
This idea is outrageous to anyone who hears it, because the detection of hundreds of indicators necessarily requires the integration of complex wiring on the chip, and the amount of blood drawn at a time is far from enough. It's a bit unrealistic to beat a multi-million-dollar lab with a portable device that you can take with you.
Elizabeth insisted on doing this, and scientific research and development should be realistic, this unbelievable idea was exchanged for millions of dollars in chip loss every month. In desperation, she had no choice but to relax the R&D standards, but who knew that she had fallen on the problem of talents.
Elizabeth is extremely controlling, requiring that all departments of the company cannot communicate with each other, and all problems and progress can only be reported to herself. As a result, I took a bunch of diamond parts, but I couldn't build a bicycle, and it was difficult to develop a product.
Elizabeth dropped out of school too early and had no experience in co-ordination, and seeing that her progress was slowing down, she had only one last resort left in her mind - overtime.
In order to promote cooperation with pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, she not only worked overtime herself, but also required all the company's R&D personnel to be "007", and also set up a new R&D team.
Two years later, the first prototype, Edison, was finally born, and at the same time, one of the teams involved in the development was also fired en masse, and Elizabeth's ruthlessness can be seen.
At this time, she was not in a hurry to put it into production, but tried every means to package the prototype, and heard that some media touted her as the female version of Jobs, Elizabeth began to lean on Jobs, no matter where she went, she wore a turtleneck black sweater with jeans, and spoke in a low voice like Jobs.
She also recruited a group of senior designers from Apple to make Edison's appearance and operating system look like Apple's mobile phone.
What's even more powerful is that with his three-inch tongue, he successfully invited Jobs's old comrade-in-arms and former vice president of Apple's software department, Ivy Tefanian, out of the mountain, and successfully made the latter invest $1.5 million.
Ivy wants to make Edison the next Apple, but he soon discovers that he is on the wrong thief ship.
Unlike Apple's working environment, he has to be watched every day under Elizabeth, and he is completely unable to communicate with other departments, and the most unbearable thing is that the company is simply a useless shell.
Elizabeth used Edison to test terminal cancer patients in order to cheat the investment into making a joke about human life, but all those who objected were fired. Ivey couldn't stand it anymore and submitted a 100-page opinion report, only to be swept away as well.
It didn't take long for the board of directors to receive a report and find that they had been fooled, and the four directors jointly wanted to fire her.
In a dramatic scene, Elizabeth snorted and tearfully said that she would change her ways, the board chose to forgive, and a storm subsided, and the employee who reported her was immediately fired.
In the years that followed, Elizabeth relied on her unnatural public relations skills to convince countless political and business tycoons that she had developed a technology for "blood dropping to detect cancer", and thus generously donated to her.
Former U.S. Secretaries of State Schultz and Kissinger, former Presidents Clinton and Obama, media tycoon Murdoch and others have all become her investors, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and opening dozens of blood testing centers.
Clinton also invited her to join his foundation, and former President Schultz was anxious with his own grandson in order to recognize Elizabeth as his godgranddaughter, and asked his grandson to go to Elizabeth's company for an internship.
In this way, Elizabeth's career has soared, and the company's valuation reached $9 billion at its peak, which can be compared to many Internet companies in the same period.
The matter was revealed and discredited
In 2015, Elizabeth was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine, and she really became the female version of Steve Jobs, and she sat with Jack Ma to talk and laugh, talking about her ideals.
As the saying goes, "when the water is full, the moon is overflowing, the moon is profitable, and the moon is losing", Elizabeth went further and further down the evil road in order to keep her cooperation with large companies.
In order to sell Edison to the common people through CMS approval, she sent the test samples to the Silicon Valley laboratory and bought a bunch of Siemens testing instruments for testing, the purpose of which was to package Siemens equipment as Edison.
In 2015, he resigned from his job with Taylor, who also worked in the lab, and tried to publicly report the error email, but was warned by his former boss to give up.
The biomedical field is not like the Internet media, which pays attention to a real talent and real learning, and a little girl who dropped out of school at the age of 19 has become a scientific genius who has changed the world, so she can only fool those middle-aged uncles in the political and business circles.
In October of the same year, the famous journalist Carback officially opened fire on Elizabeth, and published an article in the Wall Street Journal questioning the so-called "blood drop cancer detection" technology, and broke the news that only 15 of the more than 200 test indicators were detected by Edison, and the others were all from traditional equipment.
What surprised him even more was that Edison did not pass the approval of the US drug regulatory department, and who can guarantee the reliability of the test results? Elizabeth could not sit still at this time, and publicly retorted against Carrep many times, saying that he was "a shameless attack from a competitor."
After the drug regulatory authorities and the Federal Regulatory Service intervened, the truth was soon revealed, and Elizabeth's justification became a joke. Faced with overwhelming doubts, Elizabeth refused to produce evidence to prove the authenticity of the data, and was soon forced to back down and declare the test results invalid.
This completely stabbed the hornet's nest, was sued by angry people, and the investors who supported Elizabeth in the past left her one after another, losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
In less than a year, Elizabeth's valuation plummeted by more than 90%, leaving less than 800 million. On the contrary, it was the reporter who exposed her fraud, because the book "Dripping Blood into Gold", which recorded the whole incident, became famous for a while, and blood made a lot of money.
In 2018, Elizabeth was pushed to court, and the company was forced to dissolve, and in 2022, when she appeared in court, she again sold miserably: "I am very painful for the experience of those victims, and I am sorry for their expectations".
The judge was not moved by this and still handed down the sentence in accordance with the law, and Elizabeth was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Right and wrong, good and evil are in the minds of people, and the reason why Elizabeth has come to this point today is because she was blinded by financial interests and gave up her bottom line.
What do you think differently about this?