Nolte: Corporate Media Enabled Elizabeth Holmes' Fraud with Glowing Coverage
A jury has finally convicted Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud. What’s more, while testifying in her own defense, Homes admitted to being a fraud. For the first time, this godless grifter, who literally put people in danger, admitted her device was only able to complete 12 types of blood tests, not 200, as advertised. She also admitted her company used the same machines she tried to put out of business to perform the actual tests.
Thanks to Holmes, people were given incorrect medical testing results. Can you imagine? And while knowing this, Holmes, with the invaluable help of the corrupt establishment media, kept the grift alive for years, kept it going until her fraud of a company was valued at $9 billion.
None of this, however, would have been possible had an unquestioning media not fawned all over her with glowing interviews and magazine covers. The most ingenious part of her con was playing a character the corporate media would fall in love with and want to turn into a heroine. Holmes presented herself as a woman breaking into the male-dominated Silicon Valley: a left-leaning, attractive, thin, blonde vegan who wore the identical black turtlenecks favored by Steve Jobs.
And fawn the media did. Without ever investigating her claims, they fawned and fawned and fawned, frequently in lengthy profiles that only sometimes quoted her critics but then quoted her extensive denials and went right on fawning.
Here are just a few examples…
USA Today (July 2014): “Change Agents: Elizabeth Holmes wants your blood.”
Elizabeth Holmes is tall, smart and single. Well, maybe not truly single. “I guess you should say I’m married to Theranos,” Holmes says with a laugh. Only she’s not kidding.
…
The benefits of this breakthrough to Theranos could be riches; Holmes, who owns more than 50% of the stock in her company, has raised $400 million for a current valuation of $9 billion. But while Holmes is a billionaire on paper, nothing seems to interest her less.
“We’re successful if person by person we help make a difference in their lives,” says Holmes, who dresses exclusively in black and has a soft yet commanding voice that makes a listener lean in as if waiting for marching orders.
New Yorker(December 2014): “Blood, Simpler — One woman’s drive to upend medical testing.”
The day after her TEDMED talk, I met with Holmes in a conference room at the Theranos headquarters, a single-story building two blocks from the Stanford campus. (In November, Theranos moved its main offices to a larger space a few miles away.) Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.
…
The plane had reached cruising altitude, far above a bank of clouds, and another green vegetable drink had materialized in her hand. “I have done something, and we have done something, that has changed people’s lives,” she told me. “I would much rather live a life of purpose than one in which I might have other things but not that.” Also, she said, with a smile, “I think I’m very young. Still.”
Business Insider (September 2014): “This Woman’s Revolutionary Idea Made Her A Billionaire — And Could Change Medicine”
Instead you might be able to walk into a Walgreens pharmacy for a reportedly painless fingerprick that will draw just a tiny drop of blood, thanks to Elizabeth Holmes, 30, the youngest woman and third-youngest billionaire on Forbes’ newly released annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans.
Revolutionizing the blood test is a golden idea.
CNN (October 2014): “She’s America’s youngest female billionaire – and a dropout.”
America’s youngest self-made female billionaire is 30 years old and a college dropout. The company she founded has the potential to change health care for millions of Americans.
Elizabeth Holmes left Stanford University at 19 with a plan to start her own company. For money, she cashed out the funds her parents had saved for tuition. Now, she counts billionaire Larry Ellison as an investor and has former secretaries of state on her board.
Forbes(July 2014): “Bloody Amazing”
Elizabeth Holmes, 30, is the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire–and she’s done so four times over. In 2003, as a Stanford undergrad, she founded Theranos, a Palo Alto company that’s disrupting the business of blood testing, replacing the services provided by giants like Laboratory Corp. of America and Quest Diagnostics. “What we’re about is the belief that access to affordable and real-time health information is a basic human right, and it’s a civil right,” she says.
CNBC:
CBS:
Vanity Fair:
PBS:
Watch this and this and this …
Most everything listed above is deliberately pulled from 2014, just one year before Holmes and Theranos were exposed as frauds.
Sure, a lot of idiotic elites were swindled by Holmes, but how many everyday people believed the media hype and paid money to get her phony blood tests? How many everyday people believed the media and were swindled out of money they couldn’t afford to lose?
Holmes knew exactly what she was doing. She understood the role she had to play in order to become an establishment media princess. She knew to use words and phrases like “objectification” and “not about me” and “every single day we’re serving people” and “shifting the paradigm” and “women can be the best” and all kinds of pabulum about empowering women and girls.
None of this hustle would have been possible had the media done its job. But instead of questioning and investigating and demanding proof to back up her claims, they gushed and fawned and enabled a sociopath. Instead of treating her like a businesswoman, she was treated as a celebrity, and only because she sold her self as one of them.
As long as you’re one of them, you can burn down our cities, shoot police officers, loot stores, cheat elections, blacklist people and ideas, spread conspiracy theories, do business with the Nazis in China, and build a $9 billion fraud.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
