In this new era of social media, tweeting and deleting tweets, one can be grateful for these huge tools that keep your word recorded on stone, like the ten commandments that were handed to Moses, or like Hamurabi’s code written in 1750 BC. You’ll probably be wondering, what does my linking of social media with the ten commandments have to do with anything, and especially with Theranos.
Over one year and two months ago, I shared this thought with some of my friends:
Today, Elizabeth Holmes -Theranos’ CEO-, faces a fate that so far looks quite similar to the road Jeff Skilling went back in 2001-2002.
Elizabeth Holmes dropped Stanford in 2003 to start up Theranos, a company that was supposedly able to to hundreds of blood tests using just a sample taken from the tip of your finger. 13 years later, it looks like that sentence I just wrote should have the word “supposedly” replaced by “not”.
My issue in all of this, is how come investors and stakeholders put up with this for so long? It has been discovered that Holmes lured investors with preferred stock, in exchange of keeping privacy and confidenciality with the internal procedures of Theranos, that is, confidentiality of how did the testing worked… or, whether if the testing actually worked.
If you watch this video, you’ll probably have similar conclussions than mine:
The most important one is that Holmes is a psycopath. This woman has lost complete sense of reality and is in total denial of her situation, her company’s situation and the huge problems she’s creating to her employees and her clients. It’s the exact same behavior that another psycopath had: Jeff Skilling.
The irony is that she idolized Steve Jobs. The thing is, that Steve Jobs didn’t go around telling people he had this little gadget thing that fit in your pants that was able to carry 1,000 songs, but kept it hidden from the public for 13 years, kept promising to show it but never showed it. Steve didn’t even mention that he was working on his products when they were on development stage. He just launched the product once it was ready for public release. That’s why Apple is one of the most valued companies in the world. Theranos on the other hand, was valued at Nine Billion Dollars last year by Forbes. Now it’s valued at $0, also by Forbes.
You know, just because someone’s blonde, gorgeously beautiful, has a baritone deep intimidating voice and is really smart, doesn’t mean that person is able to do what he/she claims he/she can do.
HR