Elizabeth Holmes: this thing just got weirder

WAAAAAAAYYY weirder.

At first it was one of those "oh come ONNNN" things, rumor piled on top of innuendo, and I didn't believe a word of it, until I saw some recent photographs taken at that weird, avant-garde, only-the-cool-people-can-afford-it Burning Man festival. It's the kind of thing Elizabeth Holmes would go to these days, since she seems to be on some sort of delirous, careening manic high.

With her world crashing down around her ears, everything she built over ten years in a smoking ruin, facing up to twenty years in prison for fraud and endangerment of human life, WHEEEEEE! She's off with her hunky new boy friend (and to tell you the honest truth, he looks a bit like a prop, sort of like Balto, that poor wolf/dog she's dragging around with her) to get her man burned or whatever they do there, stand around with drinks and listen to techno while waving their arms in the air. Word on the street is that she is positively jubilant.

Meanwhile, and even more alarmingly, more has been revealed about the original Balto, her wolf-dog's namesake, the "hero" husky who ran through snow and sleet and dark of night to deliver antibiotics to Nome, or tea to China, or something. Turns out that Balto was just the dog who ran the last couple of miles of the arduous journey, so the press quickly caught on - his name was so catchy, you know? Never mind that he was just one of a dozen dogs who made the trip, and never mind that it was all set up so that the dog with the nicest fur should get there with the drugs in a keg around his neck. Hardly winded - wasn't that a miracle? Yes, since he'd only run about a hundred and fifty yards.

It's all just SOOOOO appropriately fraudulent for this fraudulent freak show that just gets weirder with each passing day. Now that the photos are all over the internet, I think the top is about to blow right off this thing. But then, I thought that when I read Carreyrou's book. Carreyrou's book has nothing in it about dogs, or dishy boy friends, or Burning Men. It's all moving so fast, I can't keep up.

These photos were apparently taken about half a year ago, if you're to believe they're on the level - well, it really does LOOK like Elizabeth, though my first thought was, naaaaahhhh. . . 

Can you blame me for thinking it just might be another fraud?

UPDATE. Another one. Or several! Every day, new photos are dredged up, and since they are on social media, it's plain Elizabeth wants the world to know what she's up to. She's still posing with her magazine-cover (mail order?) boy friend at some green event, and doing some soulful camera trick with yellow light.

There is a whole series of these, mostly boring, of Elizabeth out in the snow. The Daily Mail article was aghast that she was toting her own suitcase. Maybe it's a Fendi or something. But - out in the snow? Her??

POST-BLOG REVELATIONS. Even more is coming out about Elizabeth's new fiance, William "Billy" Evans. He's a rich kid like her, a hotel heir who works for some sort of Silicon Valley startup (!), so they sort of gravitated to each other. I wonder what his family thinks of this. But I sense that things are ricocheting Elizabeth back into the public's favor, if only because of its obsessive need to stalk celebrities, whether they're genuine or not.

So here's some bumph about Evans, which may or may not be true. It may be just a memorizing-Jane-Austen-fluent-in-Mandarin-reading-Moby-Dick-in-a-single-sitting-at-age-nine type of deal, meaning it's all hype. He may even, like the technology at Theranos, merely be a figment of Elizabeth's imagination. But here goes:

He attended prep school in Chicago from an early age, enrolling at Francis W Parker when he was in kindergarten and remaining there until he went off to college.

Evans chose MIT for college, and was able to also spend time in China at Fudan University.

He graduated in 2015 with a Bachelor's Degree in Science and Economics, at which point he took a post at LinkedIn before making the move in 2017 to Luminar Technologies.

That is the company which is currently hard at work attempting to create and then mass market driverless cars.

Evans is one of three children born to William and Susan Evans. 

#EveryWomanCan   Change the World    Elizabeth Holmes     Glamour

The family grew up in the San Diego area, which is where Evans' grandparents, William and Anne, started the Evans Hotel Group in 1953.

The hotel group now owns three major resort properties on the west coast: the Catamaran, the Baha and The Lodge at Torrey Pines.

Anne remains the chairman emeritus of the company, and when her husband passed away in 1984 her children William and Grace joined the company.

They were soon followed by their spouses, and those five now comprise the leadership team for the hotel group.

On the company website, Evans' father is described as 'a passionate collector of California Impressionist art, rare specimen palm trees and subtropical plants, and antique racing automobiles'.

Evans' mother, it is noted, 'made the commitment to dedicate herself to raising their three children – Billy, Rex, and Gracie—before accepting her current position.'

"Call me Balto": Elizabeth Holmes' talking wolf

Though he may look and act like a Siberian husky, Elizabeth Holmes' new dog, Balto, is actually a wolf. How do we know? Because she told us he's a wolf. Just like she told us we could run 200 diagnostic tests on a single drop of blood. So it must be so!

This weird little collage represents images of Elizabeth's most extreme blue-eyed stares, Balto the wolf-dog, huskies in general, actual wolves (which Balto is), and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, who had the best husky ever, Yukon King. "On, King! On, you huskies," was the cry I remember from my very early childhood (Sgt. Preston was on in about 1957, when I was three years old. By that age, Elizabeth was working for NASA full-time, teaching graduate-level courses on the complete works of Jane Austen, and winning the Nobel Prize for Most Convincing Bullshit Artist of the 21st Century).

Because Elizabeth is newly-enamoured, her dishy young beau William ("Billy") Evans is here, too, he of the very white smile and perfect 2-day stubble. I think she pulled the guy off a magazine cover or called an escort service or something. Or maybe we're just mad that she's so dang happy when she should be miserable! This IS something like dancing on your Mom's grave, completely inappropriate, though we know from the past that nothing touches Elizabeth (except maybe William "Billy" Evans). 

But what worries me most is a certain underlying fear that one of her more heavy-duty sugar Daddies (Henry Kissinger,  maybe?) will pull out a few billion at the last minute and bail her out. It could happen. She may have one more ace up  her sleeve. Mad about the boy! Mad about the dog (who is really a wolf)! Don't count her out just yet.

P. S. When quizzed on the first three words of Moby Dick (the immortal phrase "Call me Ishmael"), a book she professed to read at age nine, she didn't miss a beat. 

"Look! A whale!" 

And do you know what? She's right! It says so, right in the book.

Elizabeth Holmes: She-wolf of Wall Street

ELIZABETH HOLMES HAS A HUSKY NAMED BALTO AND TELLS EVERYONE HE IS A WOLF 

Elizabeth Holmes, a blonde woman with an army of black turtlenecks who at least one person has described as someone who “absolutely has sociopathic tendencies,” has been known to lie. Her company Theranos—which she claimed was capable of running hundreds, if not thousands, of diagnostic medical tests with a single drop of blood—gave patients fake test results for years. Holmes deceived investors to drum up a $9 billion valuation for the company. She could not answer a number of questions in her 2017 deposition, as she was being investigated by the SEC for fraud.

She also reportedly likes to lie about what kind of dog she has. Holmes bought her Siberian husky in 2017, according to Vanity Fair, when things were really bad at Theranos. She named him Balto, as in, yes, the beloved sweet boy who saved lives during a 1925 diptheria outbreak by delivering antitoxins to a small town in Alaska. The dog was more of a brand-building exercise for Holmes than a four-legged best friend:

The metaphorical connection was obvious. In Holmes’s telling, Balto’s perseverance mirrored her own. His voyage with the life-changing drug was not so different from her ambition.

Which was extremely useful to Holmes:

In an industry full of oddballs, Holmes—a blonde WASP from the D.C. area—seemed hell-bent on cultivating a reputation as an iconoclastic weirdo. Having Balto seemed to help fortify the image.

And was even more helpful when she lied and told anyone who’d listen that Balto was a wolf:

Around this same time, Holmes says that she discovered that Balto—like most huskies—had a tiny trace of wolf origin. Henceforth, she decided that Balto wasn’t really a dog, but rather a wolf. In meetings, at cafés, whenever anyone stopped to pet the pup and ask his breed, Holmes soberly replied, “He’s a wolf.”

But we mustn’t look down on Balto for the actions of his owner, for he had no control over what Holmes said or did. He did, however, poop all over the Theranos office, and for that, we can say Balto really is a true American hero and has a nose for the morally right thing to do:

Holmes brushed it off when the scientists protested that the dog hair could contaminate samples [...] Accustomed to the undomesticated life, Balto frequently urinated and defecated at will throughout Theranos headquarters.

I hope Balto has a nice life, whether that’s with Holmes (who still tells people he’s a wolf), or perhaps, I don’t know, with me, a person who would love a dog and would never dramatize aspects of their genetic background to make myself look cooler. Just saying! Godspeed, Balto.

- Frida Garza, Jezebel