In Otter News, January 2022: Hell No to Theranos
Elizabeth Holmes is like if a spam phone call was a person.
Welcome to the second ever instalment of Things You Otter Know, my (Ottavia Paluch’s) bi-weekly newsletter. Every first Sunday of the month, I’ll be writing a column I’ve dubbed In Otter News, where I talk about something that recently happened and which pisses me off. Kind of like what I wrote about here for Medium, except this time I’ll be writing more consistently and about more interesting things. (Or at least they’re interesting to me. I’ll be like TMZ, but for Otters.)
I was supposed to send you this email yesterday morning but I didn’t actually start it until later that day. Oops! Also this took me seven hours to write. Applaud me.
The next email you’ll be getting from me will hopefully arrive on Sunday, January 23. It’ll be the first ever edition of Otterbiography, my other monthly column for this newsletter that is all about…you guessed it…ME!!
One final thing: thank you for helping me surpass 50 subscribers for this newsletter! I think that is extremely wonderful, especially since this thing has only been a thing for not even, like, 10 days. What if we hit 60 subscribers by the time I email you again? I think that would be pretty sick.
Until then, enjoy this WWE smackdown of Elizabeth Holmes…
I was really struggling to think of something to write about for this email. And then this Twitter Moment thingymajing popped up in my Twitter “explore” page or whatever, and it was talking about how even though Elizabeth Holmes is going to jail the system she benefited from is still super messed up and whatnot. So I saw it, right? And I was like, “YES! That’s what I’m going to write about.” So here we are. ANYWAYS. About this Elizabeth Holmes lady. Her story’s been everywhere the last few weeks because she was just on trial (we’ll get to that). They’re writing books and making podcasts and releasing documentaries and eventually will be filming movies about her story. Hell, Jennifer Lawrence is going to be playing Elizabeth Holmes in a movie one of these days. I wish we were all that lucky to have famous actresses playing ourselves in movies. (I wonder who would be playing me in the movie version of my life. Sound off in the comments!)
And the reason, at least in my view, as to why the entertainment industry is going nuts over Elizabeth Holmes is because Elizabeth Holmes is like if a robocall was a person. Like, you know how almost every day you get those stupid voicemails where this robotic male voice is like, “Hello. It’s your lucky day! You. Have been named the recipient of. One-hundred-thousand dollars! But first. Before claiming your prize. You must pay. Taxes. On. Your winnings. Please leave us a voicemail with. The password to your bank account. Your social insurance number. AND. Your birth certificate. We need this information to. Confirm. Your identity. Totally not to scam you. Thank you for shopping at Shoppers Drug Mart. Goodbye.”
(Okay, I was getting a little carried away there at the end. Are there Shoppers Drug Marts in the U.S.? All of my international readers must think I’m on drugs or something.)
What I’m trying to say is, you know how you get those kinds of phone calls? And you’re like, “Goddamnit, I hate these goddamn phone calls. Goddamnit!” Now imagine if you didn’t say that. Imagine if you called back and said, “Yes, I would like to have all of that money. Here is all of the information you requested. Thank you and have a good day.” And then you wait patiently for a week or two for the $100,000 to roll into your bank account, but it never arrives. That was Elizabeth Holmes towards a great many of her billionaire shareholders.
So this whole thing starts when Liz (yes, I’m calling her that now) is nineteen and studying chemical engineering at Stanford before yours truly is even conceived. And one day she’s like, “Damn. Blood testing SUCKS. I’m scared of needles. I have relatives who have actual phobias towards needles. I wish there was a way you could do blood testing without having to use needles. That would friggin RULE.”
Not long later, she’s like, “Oh my god. WHAT IF I didn’t need a vial the size of my ego and instead just invented a blood test that only required a very small amount of blood? YES!” And thus, Theranos was born. It was actually called Real-Time Cures at first. Thankfully she changed it because she thought people were skeptical of the word “cure”. Which I can attest to.
So THEN she goes to talk to multiple medicine professors at Stanford and proposes her idea to them. They tell her that what she wants to do can’t be done. But here’s the kicker. She doesn’t care! She’ll MAKE it work! Bend the laws of physics in the name of cash. After all, E(lizabeth) = mc2. So she talks to one of her engineering professors by the name of Channing Tatum Roberston and manages to persuade him to back it. On top of that she networks with her family members to raise money. (If you can even network with your own family members. Imagine me networking with my friggin uncle. “Hey, Uncle, do you have like, money that you can give to your loving niece?” “No.” End of networking session.)
So around 2004 she’s 20 and out of college. Not that she graduated two years early - she dropped out. Much of that is because, thanks to early funding Theranos received, she has more money in her bank account than she can count. I’m talking $6.9 million bucks. Enough to pay her Stanford tuition 23 times over. (I would know. I did the math.)
To put that into further perspective: I turn 20 next year (which is crazy in itself. Me?? Being OLD?! Impossible.) You know how deranged I would become if you gave me $7 million bucks around the time I turn 20? I’d be like, “screw all of you, I’m off to the Bahamas.” I’d quit writing, I’d quit school, I’d quit bloody everything! Actually, no, I wouldn’t quit writing. I’d continue writing but about even more boring stuff than I already do and in an even more boring way than I already do. Imagine Things You Otter Know but the Otterbiography portion is just me being like, “okay guys so I was just chilling all month long y’know, lounging around here in the Bahamas, fanning myself with my own hundred-dollar bills, eating caviar and stuff, living the life I was meant to live. Oh yeah and my favourite musician is Machine Gun Kelly now. He’s like if Blink-182 were actually a punk band. Bye, posers!”
And the hilarious thing is that Liz Holmes did not do this, even though she absolutely could. Instead she chose to pursue a somehow even more ridiculous lifestyle - trying to get even richer. As in, I-want-far-far-FAR-more-money-than-I need money. Billionaire money. I bet that’s her favourite word. Bill-ee-oh-naire. Rolls off the tongue so nicely, eh, Liz?
Even in the early years of the company, Liz had to fight off some of her haters - or what I would more appropriately call, “people-who-are-right-about-this-whole-mess (PWARATWMers). A dude named Henry Mosley was the CFO (or Cool Frank O’Hara, for short. Oh God do I wish that that’s what it stood for) of Theranos, when he was fired in 2006 for questioning the operations of the company, specifically the lack of proof that the stuff they were doing was reliable and scientifically accurate. He brought it up to Holmes, who basically told him, “That’s fake news, you’re fake news, annnnnd your job is fake news because from this point onward you won't have it anymore. Sayonara!”
Liz and Theranos kept chugging along. By 2007, they were valued at around 200 million. By 2010, a billion. Ridiculousness. The next year, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz joins Theranos’s Board of Directors. That hire would lead to a bunch of other super rich old men with governmental and business ties, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former Wells Fargo Chief Executive Richard Kovacevich, joining the Avengers of scan corporations. All of them completely buying into this BS!
In 2014, Theranos is valued at $9 billion, with Holmes valued at $4.5 billion. Forbes dubs her the youngest self-made female billionaire. Not the first time they’ve made a mistake calling someone that! Cough cough Kylie Jenner cough cough.
By this point Liz was a household name. She did TED talks, spoke at world-renowned conferences for smart rich people, and appearing on magazine covers and in magazine interviews. Including *deep breath*: Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, Forbes, Inc., CNBC, CNN, The Economist, The New Yorker, Time, Glamour, and WIRED. No, I didn’t bother to read all of these because I have a life. But all the press she did for this…scam…astounds me.
Another thing we have to talk about is Holmes herself. What a character! This woman was obsessed with Apple and Steve Jobs. She wore turtlenecks all the time, just like Steve did. (This I can forgive, because I wear sweatpants every day.) She hired former Apple employers and designers to work on their testing machines. She decorated her office with furniture Steve owned and devoted her life to her company - again, much like Steve. She also spoke in a baritone voice as an attempt to get more people to take her seriously, which is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, and relatedly, this is the best headline I’ve ever seen. Her long-defunct Twitter account is like a time capsule from another era - before things went swiftly downhill for her - so professional, so perfect, so full of quotes from Margaret Thatcher, of all people??? And as a kid Holmes apparently had a serious competitive streak; apparently there were multiple instances where she ran through a screen door after losing a game of Monopoly. Which, honestly, me.
Overall, an ambitious young white woman who emulates Steve Jobs, knows how to manipulate the minds of billionaires-turned-potential-stakeholders, and wants to change the world? That’s a recipe for success. Right?
And now for my favourite part of the story: the day it all came crumbling down.
John Carreyou is a badass investigative reporter who used to work for the WSJ, and during the height of Theranos, he decided he had enough of Liz’s shit. He started poking around for sources who also had enough of Liz’s shit. And then, on October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal published this exposé of Theranos’ shenanigans, and it was the most beautiful bombshell to ever bombshell. It revealed that their blood-testing machines could only run a small fraction of the 200+ tests Holmes said it could run, and denied that inaccurate tests were being sent to patients even though they absolutely were, among other things.
Journalist Roger Parloff, who had interviewed Holmes the year before and who felt like her responses to his questions were dodgy and deceptive, tried contacting Holmes the day the WSJ article came out, only to find out that she couldn’t be reached because - and I’m not making this up - she was being inducted into the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows. He explained how he felt about it to Rolling Stone:
“I was just stunned. I was thinking in my mind, ‘The Wall Street Journal has just said you’re a fraud and the company is a fraud. The company I put on my magazine is a fraud. And you’re going to spend the whole day hiding out at this honorary horse shit? You need to get out here…and explain what the fuck is going on at your company.”
Sounds like something I would write, but he literally could not have said it any better.
And then (although I’m not so sure on when she said this) Holmes went on CBS and uttered this ottetly iconic quote:
"This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden you change the world.”
Without context, you’d think she was a genius. With context, however, you just kinda gotta reread it 35 times and then laugh hysterically.
Then the dominoes started falling.
The FDA read Carreyou’s story and was like, “Maybe we should show concern over this, eh?”
Then, in 2016, Holmes was banned from the lab-testing industry for two years. *plays “Ironic” by Alanis Morrisette*
Theranos then shut down all of their lab operations and so-called “wellness centers.”
In March 2018, Theranos and Holmes, got charged with "massive fraud" by the SEC, so she was in deeeeep mud by then.
As part of this punishment, Holmes gave up control of the company, paid $500,000 (which, when you consider her wealth, is the equivalent of a $5 fine for us normal people) and returned a gazillion shares of Theranos stock.
She started writing to investors, begging them for money, which is the equivalent of Bill Gates starting a GoFundMe in the aftermath of his divorce. (Oh my god would that be hilarious.)
In June 2018, Holmes announced that she was stepping down as CEO…
…and ON THE VERY SAME DAY, the Department of Justice charged Holmes with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. No idea what that means. I’ll just assume she was charged for being a pile of hot garbage.
A few months later, in September 2018, Holmes announced that Theranos was shutting down. Good RIDDANCE!
Oh yeah, and remember the guy I mentioned at the top of this email? Liz’s engineering prof, Channing Robertson? In 2012 he left his professor job a mr Stanford to join Thernos’ Board of Directors. But even after the company had begun its downfall, Robertson was still convinced that their technology worked! Actually, scratch that. He was paid to say that he was still convinced that their technology worked. Loser.
Since the end of Theranos, Liz has kept busy by…falling in love?!?!
THIS IS A REAL TWEET. (Theranos did not pay this Nick Bilton guy to tweet it, obviously.) I understand that Liz is better-looking than, say, Charles Manson, but if SHE, a disgraced former billionaire who scammed MILLIONS, can find love?! Then I ABSOLUTELY can!!!!! My mom says sometimes that I’ll never have a boyfriend due to my various issues, but it turns out there are more gullible fish in the sea than I thought.
Liz was supposed to go on trial in March of last year, but that got pushed back to August because Liz had a baby! The ultimate “yes-I’m-a-former-billionaire-but-I-would-really-appreciate-it-if-you-could-please-feel-sorry-for-me-instead-of-sending-me-to-prison” tactic.
But the trial did eventually happen, and as you may have already heard, Elizabeth Anne Holmes now faces the possibility of DECADES IN PRISON!!!!
She was found guilty on four counts of things - again, no idea what kind because I’m dumb - but definitely things, okay? Each of her counts carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a requirement to pay victims restitution.
We still don’t know when her sentencing hearing will happen, but Judge Judy better hurry up and make it happen, like, stat.
So what can we take away from Liz’s story?
what i take away from liz's story is that i hate silicon valley