“It was an incredibly alluring narrative that everyone wanted to believe.”

“Here was a photogenic, telegenic young woman posing as the female Steve Jobs,” recalled Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley who holds a professorship at the University of Washington. Holmes became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire in 2015 and at the time was compared to the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whom she idolized and attempted to emulate with her uniform of black turtlenecks. The company attracted big-name board members, including the former US secretary of defense James Mattis, former US secretary of state George Shultz and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, adding to the hype and giving the company an air of legitimacy.

Holmes began to promote the technology publicly around 2013, and quickly became a media darling, finding herself on the covers of magazines including Forbes and Fortune. Allegedly inspired by a fear of needles, the young founder claimed she wanted to revolutionize the medical industry and eliminate the need for large blood samples for diagnostics. Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 at the age of 19, filing a patent for a technology that could perform a large range of tests with just a small amount of blood such as from a fingerprick. “It has emerging technology and the typical marketing bravado of a startup, all in the crosshairs of the federal criminal justice system.” The dropout “This is a bellwether case,” said Jason Mehta, a Florida attorney with expertise in federal fraud cases in the health industry. She could spend up to 20 years in prison, and has pleaded not guilty. Holmes, 37, is facing trial in a California courtroom, charged with defrauding Theranos’s patients and investors.

Bad blood startup