Elizabeth Holmes: She Who Does Not Blink

The wizard of corporate fraud reveals how truly sociopathic and manipulative a doe-eyed blonde can be. I've been spending a lot of time doing gifs and YouTube videos of Holmes, slowing the speed so that the underlying expressions can spill out. Open those windows of the soul, baby.

If you haven't heard of her, Holmes is a self-styled Steve Jobs lookalike (or sound-alike: her voice is somewhere in the basso register) who claimed she had invented a device that would - no kidding, she really said this - "change the world". It was a tiny gizmo called a "nanotainer" which would revolutionize medicine, health care and the human condition for all eternity. Her genius empire was called Thanatos - oops, I keep on doing that! I mean THERANOS. Some sort of portmanteau of "therapy" and "I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge". 

There is no Theranos, there WAS no Theranos, just two vapid blue eyes, a vast expanse of  very white teeth, and an ego the size of Jupiter. Holmes literally sold  a product which didn't exist, which never existed, over a period of ten years, earning roughly NINE BILLION dollars. How she pulled this off, this gargantuan fraud, convincing people she could run hundreds of different blood tests using just one drop of blood - it's the stuff of movies, and one is being made right now. I highly recommend John Carreyrou's brilliant dissection of the whole mess, Bad Blood - a book so absorbing I don't want it to end. 

Like they say, you can't make this stuff up.