(from the trailer) Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.
My worst nightmare would be to wake up in a room with SV tech execs, something like her + zuck + musk + altman, legit impossible to tell if they're human or skinwalkers
I imagine this movie will be pretty successful as well and talked about a good bit on social media, between this and The Curse Nathan probably has formed a pretty good relationship with A24, I hope they continue to fund his antics for a while. The Rehearsal was some of the best television ever and I'd love to see more projects of that caliber.
She would have made a terrific actress playing mafiosi. I can see her giving that death stare while knifing Johnny nine-toes and pulling out his entrails.
> But the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
The difference between science and engineering right there...
she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
I think we can say Altman is worse, his products lead to actual deaths of people just like Holmes. Altman caused children to commit suicide so I think that's worse. Altman will likely be seeing the inside of a prison cell by 2030. The public wants blood and it's either Altman or Zuckerberg.
How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
Eh, In my experience this is not a clean distinction. My work is generally described as engineering and it often involves discovering new things about the technology, with a similar level of uncertainty. (and it often needs to be a lot more rigorous than a lot of the papers I read in the same field).
Of course. It's the real world, there is no bright-line.
But broadly if you are dealing with building something in a world with constraints (time, materials, money, speed, safety) then it's more engineering. If you are studying how things work to try to build something without these constraints without then it's applied science. If you are developing new theories then that is fundamental science.
> the applied scientist is by definition not interested in changing reality, only in studying, explaining, and predicting it. The engineer, on the other hand, accepts the explanations and predictions of the applied scientist, and then acts to change reality to achieve some goal
And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
She gave people medical test results that were incorrect. Say what you want about PE, the medical diagnostics firms they own provide accurate test results to patients.
We have an entire insurance industry that makes money denying care to Americans while they die, or are those okay deaths since it's done under the confines of shareholder value?
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
> To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
That’s true. But this idea was unworkable because of basic biology/physics. It doesn’t matter how good the sensor is if you’re dealing with bad samples.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
But the implication is that others weren't banging their heads. The amount of money invested in this particular domain is in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions. There are so many companies whose lives, whose workflows, product lines would be made vastly easier.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
> Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
I also caught the trailer in my feed thinking it must be an actor. But as I watched it, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was Holmes. Maybe I'd previously heard her voice before... but also that unshaken self-delusion(?) was incredible.
I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"
If you think about it a little harder, the pattern isn't just gender but "thing you are standing out for".
In the Holmes case, she was visibly celebrated for being a young female (as a positive) so it's not shocking that it flipped to a negative on people's mind when she was proven to be a fraud.
In the case of SBF, he wasn't celebrated for being male. But he was notable for his association with "effective altruism". Has the reputation of the EA community been adversely affected by his downfall? Absolutely. So that's the more part analogy here.
You also won't find this for future female founders, because the comment you're replying to is a random internet poster imagining things. You can say "I can imagine VCs saying..." and then complete the sentence with literally anything nonsense, it doesn't mean its real.
A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.
No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.
Even after Holmes, Charlie Javice got funded. Even now Mira Murati and others involved in AI are well funded.
I don’t think upper class white women are affected much by Elizabeth Holmes.
It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.
The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing
Yeah, the same is maybe more obvious outside of HN, but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried", like how media showcased Zuckerberg initially, before everyone realized his true colors.
They still say it about Sam Bankman Friendman and that failed situation awareness fund dude that worked for him.
They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
Let’s not forget the new new wunderkind who was hailed as the new financial genius and whose AI fund got trash sold to Citadel for 20% of its value (after rising 450% of course)
> but engineer/tech companies often play the same trope but on "brilliant and smart people but bit naive/rose-tinted views that couldn't unintentionally harm anyone even if they tried"
Was referring to that before he went full mask off he was "that guy who does EV's" to anyone not paying close attention.
Don't use PayPal when pointing to an achievement of Musk's.
PayPal was already a working prototype, trademarked, and ready to go when Musk's failing-to-take-off online bank merged with them.
Musk was made CEO because he was the largest shareholder when they tried to figure out relative valuations at the merger.
He lasted four months. Spent most of it arguing with engineering about throwing away the full working prototype in favor of rewriting it from scratch in a language he understood, and arguing with the board about whether or not that was really what he should be focused on as CEO.
He lasted four months.
And in a world where executives resign, or "spend time with their family", etc., the Board of PayPal, having just attended Musk's wedding that weekend, publicly fired him on Monday morning as he was boarding a plane to go to his honeymoon. That is how bad it was.
Musk's actual contribution to PayPal is mostly "cashing the dividend checks".
The lack of awareness was the prof not realising corporate and upper class women are just as capable of being con artists with a dysfunctional grasp on reality as men are. (Other women are too, but they don't get the opportunities.)
It's an ironically sexist assumption.
Although at the same time men are less likely to face consequences - unless they defraud big-ticket investors without prior permission. Which was the true crime here, and the only one that matters at these levels.
And the general scam of an attractive young woman speaking to a bunch of elderly men (realy, look up the early investors) and somehow convincing them to part with thier money is as old as time.
"The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering" is how the richest man on the planet amassed his wealth. OP is doing the exact same thing he's accusing other people of doing, focusing too much on identity.
Holmes surely used her gender as a tool the same way all these striving psychopaths will use whatever is at their disposal, but if it wasn't her gender, it just would have been something else. And singling out her gender as uniquely responsible will do more harm than good as it will be used as a cudgel against all future women founders in a way someone like Musk or Sam Bankman-Fried won't for men. Or maybe this early xkcd[1] put it better.
Which is why everything should be open for robust questioning and debate, and individual cases made on their own merit — not based on whatever favored group characteristic happens to put someone or something beyond debate.
I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.
To use a micro-example - I've been to various Trump buildings around the world. I've skated at a trump operated rink, I've seen the trump golf courses. So whatever opinion we have about trump and his practices, there's clearly a tangible output, a product that people use and enjoy.
I do agree that trump certainly cultivates an image of success but there is also clearly tangible success there. SBF and Holmes are in a different category in that there was nothing behind it.
It's pretty well documented that his father groomed his image for him with the money he earned in real estate. A lot of things with Trump's name on them are things he didn't actually build. They are branding agreements.
Umm yes? Example: when crypto was at the height of hype, I assumed that most businesses in that space were scams(to different degrees) - and that those who invested in the scam ones without due diligence were taken in by wanting to ride that wave.
At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder
You are missing the point. The praise of her was devoid of even a nod to the actual element of achievement.
I know this because this was the first time I heard of Holmes and obviously well before the downfall and the fact that the story jumps out from my memory is because of how weird that phrasing was.
Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.
Hard disagree. It wasn't the only thing, but it was so clear that all the fawning, uncritical media coverage and general buzz really "wanted a female Steve Jobs". And all the ways that Holmes emulated Jobs in style but not substance went along with that.
I'll give you another example that was about the same time, with much lower stakes, but it always really annoyed me. An entrepreneur, Grace Choi, launched the "Mink 3D makeup printer" at Tech crunch Disrupt in 2014. At the time, it was pretty clear to me that the device was an idea that wasn't functional yet, but there was tons of coverage at the time of how revolutionary this was, and also basically scoffing at the idea that the male-only TechCrunch judging panel couldn't possibly have any ability to evaluate the device, and any criticisms they had were obviously just sexism. Here is an example of a typical fawning article at the time: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniserestauri/2014/06/30/a-har...
Now, Ms. Choi is not an Elizabeth Holmes, and from what I can tell it looks like she eventually got something functional (but honestly I can't tell how much) around 2019-2020. But she never "blew up" anything, I'm unable to tell if she ever had real deliveries, and her minkbeauty.com website looks to be defunct. I'm not blaming her for creating a product that failed, but moreso what she did create was a ton of uncritical coverage from the perspective of "She's a woman disrupting a world men don't understand!"
The world is now teeming with hucksters and fakers, and sure, while I'd guess the majority of those hucksters and fakers are likely men, whenever you create unspoken rules that "people of a certain sex/race/class aren't allowed to criticize because they don't have the 'lived experience'" then you obviously throw the door wide open to shysters who will take advantage of that.
> uncritical media coverage and general buzz really "wanted a female Steve Jobs". And all the ways that Holmes emulated Jobs in style but not substance went along with that.
Even if you're right, so what? Nobody signed over millions in investment on that basis. Nobody signed contracts on that basis.
They signed contracts on the basis of the influence network and the prior investment money, i.e. the connections that Holmes had.
There are not a ton of women founders, but none of them have had the media coverage, nor the easy money that Holmes raised.
- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.
- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.
- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.
- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'
I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.
Well, to become the world's youngest female billionaire, you just have to pick the right parents and birth date. Difficult to do for sure, but seems much less interesting to talk about than becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.
Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.
Yet paradoxically, being old is nearly a requirement for political office.
Biden was the oldest president in history, and with his re-election, Trump will become the oldest president in history should he live out his term.
The average age of the 119th Congress overall is 59 years old, with the House averaging 57 and the Senate averaging 64. For comparison, the average age of the US as a whole is just under 39.
This is probably one of the largest reasons the country is in the state it's in: most of those in power won't live long enough to see the consequences of the policies they enact, so they don't give a damn.
It’s partly by design—the word senate shares its root with the word senex “old man” (whence also senile, etc.) because it’s literally a council of elders. That’s what the Roman one was and what the US constitution (among others) was attempting to emulate.
Partly, though, it’s a bit more interesting than that[1]. Wikipedia has an interesting chart[2] titled “Lifespan of each United States president”, which shows that in modern-ish times, the generation from which US presidents come is sticky: you get three presidents born ca. 1855, then one born ca. 1865, two ca. 1875, three from the late 1880s, four(!) from the 1910s (starting with “young” JFK), Carter/Reagan/Bush Sr. oscillate between the 1910s and 1920s, then again four from the 1940s (starting with “young” Clinton) only interrupted by “young” Obama (born 1961). (I could start my recounting earlier and it would still work.) Trump and Biden appear abnormal if you look at their ages, but if you look at their birth years instead they are simply a backslide, after Obama, to the generation of Clinton and Bush Jr.
What does appear true is that generations hold onto their power for longer and longer before the snap transition to the next eligible generation happens. Longer life expectancy due to better medical care seems like a perfectly satisfactory explanation for that.
[1] I first read about this idea a few years ago and I don’t remember where, so I’ll need to attempt my own explanation. Sorry.
I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.
I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking.
? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.
Uh, let me tell you that that behavior is ignored in high profile scientists regardless of disability.
It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.
Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.
Sergey Brin (of Google fame) was known for "dating" young interns/employees at Google in the early days. Once, when HR reminded him that he could get into trouble (since it was against policy), his response was, basically (paraphrasing) along the lines of "Why am I hiring them then?"
Basically, he considered it is his right to have his way with his young interns and employees.
I don't necessarily doubt that this happened, but it's worth pointing out that this anecdote is from Adam Fisher's 2018 report of what Charlie Ayers recounted that HR told him Brin said, twenty years after the fact. Maybe it happened that way, maybe not.
Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.
Yeah, the Balwani stuff. Now I know there is nuance and some people will read this as victim shaming but...
"she was really just a innocent naive girl fighting her way up and through, revolutionizing tech and the medical industry, but being beat down, serially sexually harassed, if not assaulted, or abused by Balwani, the real evil in this story"...
Except she was the CEO. She might have had a romantic relationship with Balwani but she was his boss.
"Powerless to help herself and stop this from happening". To steal from our current occupant in the White House, "You're fired".
My memory is from when I was an advisor for Google Ventures. Theranos had come by looking for funding but wouldn't talk with GV except with an NDA (and VC will usually not sign NDAs). That made GV suspicious so they sent an employee to get tested by the device and noticed the test results came from a competitor's machine.
They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
Yeah, the same for POTUS. scams are best lead by people who both wNt to believe and hangerons that want to profit on the grift. In isolation, its typically just a cult. Throw in capitalism and suddenly, theres real stakes around the belief.
This is also a big reason for e.g. the Wirecard fiasco in Germany: Everyone, especially the politicians, really wanted a fin tech blue chip out of dot-de and wanted desperately to believe.
That said, Holmes being a woman is also why we're discussing this documentary and why everyone is almost gleefully interested in her downfall. If a man had done this one it'd have all blown over long ago.
There was some major tension in the trailer - I can't believe that's actually Elizabeth Holmes, but seeing her I can see how she managed to win over so many - she is very intense.
I get that musk frequently underdelivers and has gone insane recently, but what he’s done with spacex and Tesla is genuinely impressive. So I’m not sure what the hell do you mean, what exact standard?
I think lying to investors is essentially what she was convicted of. You can make the argument that Musk believes what he says. Or you can say that he stayed clear of methods that make malice very obvious like forging documents.
But I don't think the comparison is completely far fetched. Let's take stuff like his "funding secured" tweet, the "2016 autopilot promo video", his "Solar Roof" stunt do come a little close to outright lying to investors for my taste.
Not quite the level of forging documents, but pretty dishonest.
Holmes and Musk are not even close to being the same. Don't let politics cloud your reason. Musk under-delivers some times but what he's done with SpaceX and Tesla is concrete, massive innovation.
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
I watched a 90 second clip from this film earlier today: Holmes unblinking asking ‘Why would I deceive you…’ Really strange stuff. I have to admit that I watched the clip a second time.
In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.
For those who are experts on body language, non-verbal communication, psychological communication tricks, etc -- what on earth are we seeing in that trailer?
I’m not an expert at body language, but I think anyone can see she is trying really, really hard to appear friendly and trustworthy. But when someone is trying that hard to convince you they are benign, it makes you suspicious.
The charitable take is she is an expert in method acting; she has become the fantasy she invented. The less charitable take is that she is a sociopath lacking the ability to realize the danger and harm her fraud is causing.
I think what I'm most interested in knowing is whether she was like this before everything collapsed. Is it possible she's just super awkward or on the spectrum or something? No offense intended to folks on the spectrum!, just that my understanding is that sometimes ASD can make it harder to relate in a way that neurotypical people expect.
To me there's obviously way more going on here than just her trying to con you or being a sociopath. This is decidedly NOT what con-men look like when they're trying to take advantage of you.
Sorry thought it was paywalled. The timing before jail makes sense, but then the partner using Fielder and team for this? I suppose all of it makes perfect sense if you just suppose her and her immediate people are nutjobs
Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.
> So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.
This is so very Nathan Fielder. Perfect encapsulation of his unique brand of humor. Seyfried portrays Holmes, giving her interpretation of Holmes. Holmes watches the portrayal, giving her interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation. Seyfried watches Holmes' interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation of Holmes.
This vibe is basically the entire theme of The Rehearsal. It's an exercise in how many Matryoshka dolls we can un-nest in our meta exploration of the topic. Keep zooming out and re-view yourself in the scene you just played which is a super interesting way to discover things about yourself and others
The way The Rehearsal continues to escalate and fold in on itself is a masterclass in screenwriting.
The precision required underneath the surface to plan and execute what seems like such a spastic, increasingly desperate clusterfuck involving so many real people can only be achieved by the exact methods put on display. Endless iteration and exploration until every serious edge case is considered and accounted for. Nathan would have made a great engineer.
One thing that the earlier documentary on Theranos, The Inventor, made obvious is that Holmes is pretty charismatic at a personal level. At one point, Gibney is trying to interview her, but the camera he’s setting up isn’t working for some reason, and he’s apologizing. She says “it’s alright” and then leans in and says “we’re going to get through this” and smiles. It’s very warm. It was easier to see how people bought into her and her vision after that.
Oh wow. I saw this trailer late last night on YouTube with the sound off. I kept thinking "why do I feel like I know this person...." At the end, when it said it was a documentary, I thought: "about who?"
The HN headline here now explains it. My mind is actually a bit blown. Such proof that all you need to rehabilitate yourself is money. It started last year with sympathetic profiles in NYT of Holmes and her husband.
I suppose at this point it's just a matter of time before she (a) founds a new company or (b) runs for elected office. I love it to other commenters to think up options for (c) and (d).
Either way...a fool and their money are soon parted. And I guess Holmes is the one to part more fools from their money.
Elizabeth Holmes is definitely unhinged, but I feel there's always a little bit of sexism that goes along with it. For example, I believe you could make a very similar documentary around Sam Altman, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump. Altman and Musk just have the ability to find people who have already come up with the ideas instead of inventing the idea themselves. I have no idea how Trump does it.
> but shortly before her prison sentence was set to begin she decided she wanted someone to document her last days of freedom. Maybe she wanted to have her say
What, had she not gotten to have her say in all of the hundreds of interviews up until that point?
> the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
And yet she went to (and dropped out of) Stanford for chem eng and spent most of her time in labs and genomics. Dropout or not you can't point to her as being "corporate, not chemist".
> Holmes says to Fielder that she’s never told a lie in her life.
So what was telling some facilities people to move some document cabinets in front of the door way to the actual lab where all the FDA inspectors would see was a bank of Siemens machines doing the work that she was telling the FDA her machines were doing?
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[ 176 ms ] story [ 1956 ms ] threadhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI
Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.
I imagine this movie will be pretty successful as well and talked about a good bit on social media, between this and The Curse Nathan probably has formed a pretty good relationship with A24, I hope they continue to fund his antics for a while. The Rehearsal was some of the best television ever and I'd love to see more projects of that caliber.
Previously: https://archive.ph/sSnek
Corrected: https://archive.ph/k3Hnl
The difference between science and engineering right there...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
The politics are too good not too.
Amodei: AI will cure cancer
Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
Engineering is applying that knowledge in a effective and efficient manner.
Engineering is something that money and time can fix. There are less guarantees with science.
But broadly if you are dealing with building something in a world with constraints (time, materials, money, speed, safety) then it's more engineering. If you are studying how things work to try to build something without these constraints without then it's applied science. If you are developing new theories then that is fundamental science.
> the applied scientist is by definition not interested in changing reality, only in studying, explaining, and predicting it. The engineer, on the other hand, accepts the explanations and predictions of the applied scientist, and then acts to change reality to achieve some goal
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/PCEEA/article/view/...
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
The tech industry is rife with such suckers. We wouldn't have the wealth we have without them.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Or is a sociopath, just not *clearly*.
Just not the kind of genius that can invent new products or lead a successful company.
If she had partnered with a competent engineer and CEO, Theranos might still be in business.
The company wasn't doomed from the start. It began with a real vision.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike.
Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of these angles, they “just” had the right business plan at the right moment.
"Robots" that can talk/write like humans is probably an even longer endeavor we just managed to make believable enough to fool other humans.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
Relevant musical interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.
In the Holmes case, she was visibly celebrated for being a young female (as a positive) so it's not shocking that it flipped to a negative on people's mind when she was proven to be a fraud.
In the case of SBF, he wasn't celebrated for being male. But he was notable for his association with "effective altruism". Has the reputation of the EA community been adversely affected by his downfall? Absolutely. So that's the more part analogy here.
Did Holmes create the "I'm an amazing FEMALE entrepreneur" persona? Or was she focused on the scam and the narrative was created around her?
A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.
No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.
>quite possibly the most jewish man to ever live
Word to wise entrepreneurs.
> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...
They will even argue, forever, that the situation awareness did not failed or folded, because being margin called does not count when bright smart young person gets margin called.
Whatever you think of Musk there's a significant amount of "actually exists and works" that's on a different planet vs Theranos
Was referring to that before he went full mask off he was "that guy who does EV's" to anyone not paying close attention.
PayPal was already a working prototype, trademarked, and ready to go when Musk's failing-to-take-off online bank merged with them.
Musk was made CEO because he was the largest shareholder when they tried to figure out relative valuations at the merger.
He lasted four months. Spent most of it arguing with engineering about throwing away the full working prototype in favor of rewriting it from scratch in a language he understood, and arguing with the board about whether or not that was really what he should be focused on as CEO.
He lasted four months.
And in a world where executives resign, or "spend time with their family", etc., the Board of PayPal, having just attended Musk's wedding that weekend, publicly fired him on Monday morning as he was boarding a plane to go to his honeymoon. That is how bad it was.
Musk's actual contribution to PayPal is mostly "cashing the dividend checks".
https://archive.ph/nRXv1
The lack of awareness was the prof not realising corporate and upper class women are just as capable of being con artists with a dysfunctional grasp on reality as men are. (Other women are too, but they don't get the opportunities.)
It's an ironically sexist assumption.
Although at the same time men are less likely to face consequences - unless they defraud big-ticket investors without prior permission. Which was the true crime here, and the only one that matters at these levels.
This is a lie. Look at the OIG's blotter-- every name on it is going to be male.
Women comprise 60% of all embezzlement convictions.
Women also occupy 60% of all accounting jobs.
You'll see men facing consequences more, when you give men more opportunity to steal.
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/why-are-more-women-convi...
Heck, Henry kissinger was on her board.
Holmes surely used her gender as a tool the same way all these striving psychopaths will use whatever is at their disposal, but if it wasn't her gender, it just would have been something else. And singling out her gender as uniquely responsible will do more harm than good as it will be used as a cudgel against all future women founders in a way someone like Musk or Sam Bankman-Fried won't for men. Or maybe this early xkcd[1] put it better.
[1] - https://xkcd.com/385/
To use a micro-example - I've been to various Trump buildings around the world. I've skated at a trump operated rink, I've seen the trump golf courses. So whatever opinion we have about trump and his practices, there's clearly a tangible output, a product that people use and enjoy.
I do agree that trump certainly cultivates an image of success but there is also clearly tangible success there. SBF and Holmes are in a different category in that there was nothing behind it.
I know this because this was the first time I heard of Holmes and obviously well before the downfall and the fact that the story jumps out from my memory is because of how weird that phrasing was.
I'll give you another example that was about the same time, with much lower stakes, but it always really annoyed me. An entrepreneur, Grace Choi, launched the "Mink 3D makeup printer" at Tech crunch Disrupt in 2014. At the time, it was pretty clear to me that the device was an idea that wasn't functional yet, but there was tons of coverage at the time of how revolutionary this was, and also basically scoffing at the idea that the male-only TechCrunch judging panel couldn't possibly have any ability to evaluate the device, and any criticisms they had were obviously just sexism. Here is an example of a typical fawning article at the time: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniserestauri/2014/06/30/a-har...
Now, Ms. Choi is not an Elizabeth Holmes, and from what I can tell it looks like she eventually got something functional (but honestly I can't tell how much) around 2019-2020. But she never "blew up" anything, I'm unable to tell if she ever had real deliveries, and her minkbeauty.com website looks to be defunct. I'm not blaming her for creating a product that failed, but moreso what she did create was a ton of uncritical coverage from the perspective of "She's a woman disrupting a world men don't understand!"
The world is now teeming with hucksters and fakers, and sure, while I'd guess the majority of those hucksters and fakers are likely men, whenever you create unspoken rules that "people of a certain sex/race/class aren't allowed to criticize because they don't have the 'lived experience'" then you obviously throw the door wide open to shysters who will take advantage of that.
Even if you're right, so what? Nobody signed over millions in investment on that basis. Nobody signed contracts on that basis.
They signed contracts on the basis of the influence network and the prior investment money, i.e. the connections that Holmes had.
There are not a ton of women founders, but none of them have had the media coverage, nor the easy money that Holmes raised.
- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.
- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.
- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.
- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'
I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.
Biden was the oldest president in history, and with his re-election, Trump will become the oldest president in history should he live out his term.
The average age of the 119th Congress overall is 59 years old, with the House averaging 57 and the Senate averaging 64. For comparison, the average age of the US as a whole is just under 39.
This is probably one of the largest reasons the country is in the state it's in: most of those in power won't live long enough to see the consequences of the policies they enact, so they don't give a damn.
Partly, though, it’s a bit more interesting than that[1]. Wikipedia has an interesting chart[2] titled “Lifespan of each United States president”, which shows that in modern-ish times, the generation from which US presidents come is sticky: you get three presidents born ca. 1855, then one born ca. 1865, two ca. 1875, three from the late 1880s, four(!) from the 1910s (starting with “young” JFK), Carter/Reagan/Bush Sr. oscillate between the 1910s and 1920s, then again four from the 1940s (starting with “young” Clinton) only interrupted by “young” Obama (born 1961). (I could start my recounting earlier and it would still work.) Trump and Biden appear abnormal if you look at their ages, but if you look at their birth years instead they are simply a backslide, after Obama, to the generation of Clinton and Bush Jr.
What does appear true is that generations hold onto their power for longer and longer before the snap transition to the next eligible generation happens. Longer life expectancy due to better medical care seems like a perfectly satisfactory explanation for that.
[1] I first read about this idea a few years ago and I don’t remember where, so I’ll need to attempt my own explanation. Sorry.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...
What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
> What I read !== Stephen Hawking.
And by that logic one cannot know anything or anyone by merely reading about them, which I find to be absurd, hence my comment.
It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.
Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.
Basically, he considered it is his right to have his way with his young interns and employees.
Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.
"she was really just a innocent naive girl fighting her way up and through, revolutionizing tech and the medical industry, but being beat down, serially sexually harassed, if not assaulted, or abused by Balwani, the real evil in this story"...
Except she was the CEO. She might have had a romantic relationship with Balwani but she was his boss.
"Powerless to help herself and stop this from happening". To steal from our current occupant in the White House, "You're fired".
None of that was an issue until her trial.
They wisely decided she was full of shit, and didn't invest.
That said, Holmes being a woman is also why we're discussing this documentary and why everyone is almost gleefully interested in her downfall. If a man had done this one it'd have all blown over long ago.
This is fable level unreadable to me
–Unc
But I don't think the comparison is completely far fetched. Let's take stuff like his "funding secured" tweet, the "2016 autopilot promo video", his "Solar Roof" stunt do come a little close to outright lying to investors for my taste. Not quite the level of forging documents, but pretty dishonest.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
His unflinching stare into the eyes of interogation, while telling obvious lies, got us out of lots of trouble.
----
Thanks for The Rehearsal secondary-req. Added to my watchlist.
https://www.memesita.com/elizabeth-holmes-thanksgiving-visit...
And wtf is even a "prison camp?"
Article was fairly unfocused, any particular reason you linked it?
Taking the article at face value, I get the sense she got away with it. That's all.
Minimum security prisons
it's an embeddings things, you know
To me there's obviously way more going on here than just her trying to con you or being a sociopath. This is decidedly NOT what con-men look like when they're trying to take advantage of you.
Also why in her right mind would she sign up to do this with Fielder?
My brain hurts from this project.
> So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.
This is so very Nathan Fielder. Perfect encapsulation of his unique brand of humor. Seyfried portrays Holmes, giving her interpretation of Holmes. Holmes watches the portrayal, giving her interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation. Seyfried watches Holmes' interpretation of Seyfried's interpretation of Holmes.
This vibe is basically the entire theme of The Rehearsal. It's an exercise in how many Matryoshka dolls we can un-nest in our meta exploration of the topic. Keep zooming out and re-view yourself in the scene you just played which is a super interesting way to discover things about yourself and others
The precision required underneath the surface to plan and execute what seems like such a spastic, increasingly desperate clusterfuck involving so many real people can only be achieved by the exact methods put on display. Endless iteration and exploration until every serious edge case is considered and accounted for. Nathan would have made a great engineer.
The HN headline here now explains it. My mind is actually a bit blown. Such proof that all you need to rehabilitate yourself is money. It started last year with sympathetic profiles in NYT of Holmes and her husband.
I suppose at this point it's just a matter of time before she (a) founds a new company or (b) runs for elected office. I love it to other commenters to think up options for (c) and (d).
Either way...a fool and their money are soon parted. And I guess Holmes is the one to part more fools from their money.
https://variety.com/2026/film/reviews/musk-review-elon-musk-...
Turns out, someone is about to release a similar, 4 hour long documentary about Elon Musk.
> but shortly before her prison sentence was set to begin she decided she wanted someone to document her last days of freedom. Maybe she wanted to have her say
What, had she not gotten to have her say in all of the hundreds of interviews up until that point?
> the more Holmes talks to Fielder, the more he teases out her unhinged rationale, which is: The device works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky chemistry stuff! The strange thing is that Holmes has such a corporate mindset that she treats the chemistry stuff…that hadn’t been invented yet…as just another glitchy small problem that could easily be solved
And yet she went to (and dropped out of) Stanford for chem eng and spent most of her time in labs and genomics. Dropout or not you can't point to her as being "corporate, not chemist".
> Holmes says to Fielder that she’s never told a lie in her life.
So what was telling some facilities people to move some document cabinets in front of the door way to the actual lab where all the FDA inspectors would see was a bank of Siemens machines doing the work that she was telling the FDA her machines were doing?