Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: How a Blood-Test Startup Became a Silicon Valley Sensation

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of fraud-riddled blood-testing company Theranos, made her national reporting debut in 2013 in the Wall Street Journal. The article—“One Drop of Blood, Instant Diagnosis”—was neither a science story nor a business story. It appeared in the Opinion section under Joseph Lago, a writer on the Journal’s editorial board who won a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism of the Affordable Care Act.

How Elizabeth Holmes Built Theranos’ Public Image

Lago wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of giving individuals more direct control over their health care. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a member of the Theranos board of directors, was so enthusiastic about Holmes that he told Lago she was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

By 2014, Holmes was the youngest female billionaire in history. By the mid-2010s, she was being celebrated alongside tech success stories such as the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb and Twitter. At the time, I was an editor at WIRED, and the Theranos story presented to me felt very WIRED-like. It seemed to show that Silicon Valley’s approach to innovation could work in any industry, including health care.

Theranos’ pitch also appeared in the magazine that first popularized the idea of the “quantified self,” reinforcing the concept that people could take greater control of their health through innovative technology and access to data.

Theranos’ “One Drop, Infinite Data” Profile

One of my colleagues, editor Caitlin Roper, examined the Theranos and Holmes stories, but no one knew what form they should take. The editor-in-chief encouraged Roper to speak with Holmes to find out what had happened. The result was an influential long-form Q&A titled “One Drop, Infinite Data: How Elizabeth Holmes Built a Better Blood Test.” Because print magazines move with the agility and speed of post-Panamax freighters, the article did not appear until the March 2014 issue.

Over the next few months, other publications followed. Fortune magazine put Holmes on its cover, and The New Yorker published a profile. In October 2015, Inc. put Holmes on its cover and called her “the next Steve Jobs.” A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal put her on another cover with an article about Theranos by reporter John Carreyrou. Its headline was deceptively understated: “Theranos Is Struggling With Blood Tests.”

Oh, oh.

The Theranos Blood-Test Promise Unravels

The rapid, accurate blood test was fake, the innovative technology did not exist, and major partner Walgreens ended its contract with Theranos. That was disappointing. A new documentary film released this week follows Holmes in the weeks leading up to her imprisonment.