8/25/2023 0 Comments Sociopath vs pathological liarWhen the company’s chief financial officer found out, Holmes fired him on the spot. When Holmes courted Walgreens, she created completely false test results from their blood tests. But as The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou details in his new book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, almost every word coming out of Holmes’s mouth as she built and ran her company was either grossly embellished or, in most instances, outright deceptive.Īs Carreyrou writes, the company she built was just a pile of one deceit atop another. She spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2014, and appeared on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List in 2015. For years, Holmes was on top of the tech world, gracing the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Forbes, Fortune, and Inc., always wearing a black turtleneck and often sitting next to the title: “The Next Steve Jobs.” She was written about in Glamour and The New Yorker. of Theranos.Īhh, the story of Holmes, the dedicated Stanford dropout who was set to save the world, one pinprick of blood at a time, by inventing, at 19 years old, a blood-testing start-up which was once valued at almost $10 billion. (They don’t.) But all of these, all these made-up numbers, concocted valuations, and apocryphal stories of how a company was realized in a garage, are nothing- nothing!-compared to the audacious lies of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and C.E.O. Some C.E.O.s told taradiddles, exaggerating the number of users on their platforms ( ahem, Twitter) some in Congress say Mark Zuckerberg lied when he told Congress that people on Facebook have “complete control” over their personal data. When I told a seasoned colleague at the Times, he simply laughed and explained, “Welcome to the Steve Jobs Reality-Distortion Field.” Jobs’s chicanery helped birth a whole new strain of tech nerd who believed that, in order to be as successful as King Jobs, you had to be the best used-car salesman in the parking lot. Yet a week later, I realized I’d been duped by Jobs. After 45 minutes on the phone with Jobs, I walked over to my editor and convinced him to kill the story. I remember getting a call from Steve Jobs in the beginning of my career at The New York Times, in which the mythological chief of Apple somehow convinced me not to write a story about a software-related privacy problem. Over time, the exhalations of these tech C.E.O.s became less about the actual lie, and more about who could deliver it with the utmost persuasion. In the tech world, these falsehoods are so pedestrian that they have received the moniker “vaporware”: empty vessels that are promoted as complete products despite the knowledge that they will never see the light of day. There have always been spectacular stories of lies and deceit in Silicon Valley-tales that span decades, of founders telling half-truths about how their companies were founded, or who founded them of C.E.O.s exaggerating their latest products to fool the press or induce new funding.
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