More than six years after journalist John Carreyrou exposed Elizabeth Holmes, the husky-voiced #girlboss extraordinaire beloved by elites ranging from Henry Kissinger to Glamour magazine is finally facing criminal trial for defrauding investors, doctors, and patients with her utterly bogus blood testing regimen.
Considering that Holmes successfully conned investors out of nearly a billion dollars and risked countless lives, prison is a small price for her to pay.
Naturally, someone had to blame sexism for Holmes facing the consequences of her own actions.
The someone in this case is Ellen Pao, perhaps one of the most miserable and dour players in the entire world of venture capital.
Pao flamed out at a VC firm that she unsuccessfully sued for gender discrimination. Pao, who had cheated on her husband with a junior partner at the firm, ultimately paid her former bosses upwards of a quarter-million dollars for legal costs.
She then joined Reddit, set on promptly burning to the ground what was then the free speech haven of the world wide web. Under Pao’s tenure, the social media site fired its wildly popular director of communications and initiated a widespread censorship campaign, sparking a user revolt and Pao’s resignation. Naturally, Pao again blamed sexism. So, it comes as little surprise that this one-trick pony would play the same card for Holmes.
What is surprising is just what breathtakingly dumb drivel the paper of record agreed to print.
“Elizabeth Holmes followed the Silicon Valley playbook to a T,” writes the woman who has failed at every single Silicon Valley firm she ever joined. “She was focused and ambitious. She had a compelling vision to help humanity with technology for blood tests, and her ambition, she said, was driven by a personal fear of needles. She fit the pattern of the young, brilliant college dropout, even dressing like Steve Jobs.”
Ah, yes, what matters in business is not actually succeeding in doing anything but looking the part. Predictably, Pao admits to rooting for the “charismatic” Holmes for succeeding in “the boys’ club that is the tech industry,” only ceasing once, as Pao so oddly puts it, “it was revealed that Theranos was not transparent when its blood-testing equipment failed.”
This is an insane way to downplay Holmes constructing her entire career on willful deceit, but that’s beside the point.
It is “sexist,” Pao continues, to punish Holmes while failing to “hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment.” It’s here where her diatribe goes truly off the rails.
Pao’s naughty list includes Uber for “scandals” such as “misleading advertising,” Facebook for “the [Myanmar] genocide incited” on the platform, Tesla because an “employee reportedly described part of a Tesla manufacturing plant as a predator zone for women,” Juul for its part in “the youth nicotine epidemic,” and WeWork.
It should really, really go without saying, but not one of these companies has committed any offense akin to that of Theranos. Uber provides billions of safe and cheap rides to customers every year. Nearly half the planet uses Facebook every month. Tesla sold half a million cars last year alone. I’m literally ripping on a Juul as I type this!
The only firm that even comes close to the deception of Theranos is WeWork, But that still isn’t apt, considering that for however dishonest the company was, it still provides working space to more than half a million members.
The only victims in the Theranos scandal are those Holmes defrauded. Projection is the only reasonable explanation for why Pao would paint the undisputed villain in this saga as anything but.
