In what, you may ask? Why, in human blood. For this is the currency Elizabeth Holmes deals in. These nanoclips from some of the more drooly videos about Holmes (prior to 2016, when she was finally assassinated by the truth) only add to my astonishment at the lengths she would go to in order to appear sincere. Here she is in a lab coat - and may I say, after reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, this woman has never been within ten miles of such a thing - earnestly at work purifying blood samples and saving humanity at the same time. For that is what she lives for. The fact that someone at Theranos would set up a dummy lab so that this dummy of a woman could pretend to be working in it isn't so surprising. What surprises me is how many people gushed over her, fawned, crowned her "the next Steve Jobs" (as if the first one wasn't bad enough. Wasn't Jobs known for stealing other people's ideas?) At any rate, I want to get off this obsession now and on to a more palatable one. But I just had to share this with you. Note her robotic movements, android face, and other less-than-human features. It scares the hell out of me, it does. Think of it. She nearly had our blood.
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.
