Persona Shift

As Holmes enters prison, she's back with a new image

Around 10 years ago, Elizabeth Holmes was a widely celebrated figure and the world’s youngest self-made female entrepreneur. Her paper wealth was somewhere around the $4.5 billion mark. But after some digging by skeptical journalists — shoutout to John Carreyrou — the cracks began to appear. Then came the dramatic downfall. It ended with Holmes being sentenced to an 11-year prison sentence, which she is due to begin this month. The story of Theranos is an infamous fable that brought to light everything wrong with Silicon Valley. Fraud. Secrecy. Lies. Toxic culture. Deranged founders. Investor greed. 

But now Elizabeth Holmes is trying her best to undergo a persona shift. 

Forget the fraud. Forget the risk she put patients under with faulty test results. Forget the fact she bullied an employee so badly that they committed suicide. Forget the hundreds of millions of investor dollars that got burned. Forget that her Edison machine technology never worked as promised and likely never would because it bordered on the impossible. 

All that stuff was Elizabeth! 

These days, she’s Liz. A mother of two. A volunteer at a rape-crisis hotline.

Gone is the deep voice. Gone is the turtle neck. Gone are the toxicity and the attempts to bully and intimate all those around her into a code of silence and loyalty. 

The piece in the New York Times, penned by a journalist who admits she fell for the deception hook, line and sinker, tells all about how most of the Theranos stuff was merely an act, something she developed in order to be taken seriously. The article tries to shed a positive light on Holmes’ new family and that it was more of an unplanned thing than a ploy to swing the jury. It talks about a visit to the zoo. It mentions, several times, how nice Holmes is, and how normal she is. It even somewhat defends some of her more famous quirks, like the deep voice. 

“If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you probably think her feigned perma-hoarseness was part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously. If you spend time with Ms. Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Elizabeth Holmes, it was both.”

But, what the article is missing is the same thing that’s been missing since the company's collapse: remorse.

On the allegation that the pregnancy was a tactic to either sway the jury or at least let Holmes remain free during an appeal, Elizabeth puts it down to '“bad timing.” She met her partner Billy Evans in 2017 and said they fell in love and started a family because “they didn’t anticipate that she would be indicted” and they “didn’t anticipate that she would be sentenced to 11 years.” 

And that’s the line right there. 

Despite everything that happened, everything she was responsible for, and everything that could have happened had the unreliable machines remained in use, Holmes didn’t think she would face punishment. She isn’t sorry. She still blames naivety. She still blames external pressures. She still blames her former partner (and former boyfriend) Sunny Balwani. But she doesn’t blame herself, not for the lies, the mistruths, the faked demos, or the fake persona she adopted to present herself in a disingenuous way. 

What Holmes lacks in remorse, she makes up for in delusion. Despite her conviction and the fact she has burned her reputation, she still sees a future in healthcare innovation. In the article, she’s optimistic about what’s ahead and says she will still work on health-care-related inventions and will continue to do so behind bars. Or, as she puts it — “I still dream about being able to contribute in that space.” 

Is it just me, or are those words just insane? And to that point, the entire article is insane?

We need to ask ourselves an important question. When entrepreneurs fuck up, why do we continue to give them oxygen? Failed entrepreneurs — or those brought down by their own malpractices — are all too quick to try and rehabilitate their images. And for some reason, we, the public and the media, are all too quick to eat it up. As I wrote in last week’s edition of Trend Mill, WeWorked, Until It Didn't, Adam Neumann is already on the comeback tour, putting his WeWork debacle behind him. And venture capitalists are already throwing money at him and his fanciful ideas for the future.

I hope the world sees through this one. If the deep-voiced, deceitful intimidator was a persona designed to achieve her goals, a normal-voiced, devoted mother is just another persona with another ulterior motive behind it.