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Elizabeth Holmes and the Ghost of Steve Jobs
The legend of Apple’s founder made the Theranos scandal possible
With the release of HBO’s Alex Gibney-directed documentary the Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, the fascination with former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the implosion of her blood testing company seems to be cresting. And why not? This is a story that appears to have everything: ambition, deception, a secret love affair, political heavyweights, media moguls, whistleblowers, celebrities, an attractive blonde wunderkind, an Oscar-winning director, a suicide, the meteoric rise and fall of a media darling, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the health of thousands of people hanging in the balance. Even a feature film about the Theranos scandal starring Hollywood’s highest-paid actress Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes is already in the works.
But even with all of these tantalizing details, there is an unseen presence that seems to hover over, permeate, and influence nearly every aspect of the rise and fall of Holmes and Theranos, as well as the entirety of Silicon Valley and everything its creations influence: the ghost of Apple’s iconic founder Steve Jobs.
Holmes’ worship of Jobs and Apple was no secret, and the seemingly conscious similarities between Jobs, Holmes, Apple, and Theranos are multitudinous. The most obvious manifestation of this was Holmes’ adoption of a Jobs-like “uniform” that she wore every day, which included black turtlenecks made by the same Japanese designer who made the black mock turtlenecks that Jobs made famous. Holmes’ decision to leave Stanford during her sophomore year to start Theranos was surely legitimized by Jobs — probably the world’s most famous college dropout — and his decision to quit Reed College in the middle of his freshman year.
An admirer of Apple’s design-first aesthetic and fond of predicting that Theranos’ never-realized Edison blood testing machine would become “the iPod of health care”, Holmes aggressively recruited Apple employees like Apple’s former chief software technology officer Avie Tevanian, and even hired the advertising agency behind Apple’s most iconic ad campaigns to do the marketing for Theranos’ initial rollout to Walgreens stores. Holmes’ intense, bullying managerial style and the expectation that her employees could accomplish the…
