The Talented Ms. Holmes

From the moment Elizabeth Holmes arrived on the tech scene, around 2003, as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout with a world-changing idea, an epic ambition, and a Steve Jobs–ian aura, her rise was meteoric. By last October, her revolutionary blood-testing start-up, Theranos, was valued at some $9 billion, and she had been anointed the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Then a Wall Street Journal reporter began looking at the science. In the wake of Theranos’s stunning collapse, amid civil and criminal investigations and class-action lawsuits, NICK BILTON explains why Silicon Valley saw only what Holmes wanted it to see

- Nick Bilton

It was late morning on Friday, October 18, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address her employees at Theranos, the blood-testing start-up that she had founded as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, which was now valued at some $9 billion. Two days earlier, a damning report published in The Wall Street Journal had alleged that the company was, in effect, a sham—that its vaunted core technology was actually faulty and that Theranos administered almost all of its blood tests using competitors’ equipment.

The article created tremors throughout Silicon Valley, where Holmes, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, had become a near universally praised figure. Curiosity about the veracity of the Journal story was also bubbling throughout the company’s mustard-and-green Palo Alto headquarters, which was nearing the end of a $6.7 million renovation. Everyone at Theranos, from its scientists to its marketers, wondered what to make of it all.