
Ask HN: Was Elizabeth Holmes just a face controlled by people in the background? - dangban
The more I read about Elizabeth Holmes, the more implausible the whole thing seems.<p>She drops out of Stanford to start a blood-testing start-up. Plot-twist, she has no background in blood or testing.<p>Her company makes various blood testing prototypes. Plot-twist, they&#x27;re actually glue-guns bought off Amazon.<p>Her company gets a contract from US&#x27;s largest pharmacy chain to do blood-tests. Plot-twist, her company doesn&#x27;t use its own machines to do this, but uses off-the-shelf machines that are already standard.<p>Her team files over 200 patents. Plot-twist, she&#x27;s a co-inventor in 98% of them.<p>There are a lot of recordings of her talking. Plot-twist, they all consist of word-salad talking points, about using technology to change the world, without anything substantive.<p>She dressed like Steve Jobs, lowered her voice artificially to a baritone to sound more &quot;deep&quot;, and used cool-sounding branding like &quot;Edison&quot;, &quot;nanotainer&quot;, &quot;Theranos&quot;, &quot;Balto&quot;. Plot-twist, her head-scientist committed suicide.<p>When she was 10, she wrote in a school year book that she wanted to become a billionaire. Plot-twist, she became one.<p>I have 2 hypotheses:<p>1) She was a face (a front) for a group of shadowy fraudsters (VC&#x27;s?), who almost managed to pull of one of the biggest heists in history.<p>2) This is very common. Any &quot;media hyped&quot; startup out there fronted by an attractive founder with an implausible origin story is suspect.
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PhilWright
'When she was 10, she wrote in a school year book that she wanted to become a
billionaire. Plot-twist, she became one.'

That is not a plot twist, that is the plot.

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ddri
It doesn't make sense. Plot twist: Silicon Valley is an interesting place.

