The Next Steve Jobs

Many entrepreneurs and their backers will tell you they're playing the long game. But no one's doing it quite like Theranos's Elizabeth Holmes.

- Kimberly Weisul

YOU’D HAVE TO look really hard not to see Steve Jobs in Elizabeth Holmes. Both Holmes and Jobs were loners as kids. As a teenager, Jobs discovered Plato; Holmes favored Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Both dropped out of college, in part, because they didn’t see the virtue in an education they believed wouldn’t make a difference in their futures. Like the Apple creator, Holmes has kept her company, Theranos—which seeks to radically disrupt the lab test industry—shrouded in secrecy. Jobs became a billionaire by the time he was 40. For Holmes, that moment came sooner, when Theranos was valued at $9 billion. She was not yet 31.

Of course, one obvious difference between them is that Holmes is a young woman in an environment that has long favored young men. But there are few entrepreneurs—of either gender—with Holmes’s record of accomplishment and even fewer willing to talk about it publicly. Holmes didn’t set out to become a role model; she set out to save lives. But now, as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, she’s stumbled into this rarefied position and is beginning to own it. “I really believe it’s like the four-minute mile,” says Holmes, whose estimated net worth is $4.5 billion. “When one person does it, more and more people do it.”