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If this is not Culture War tell me, but I'm flabbergasted, I have to share that with you all.
So it seems there is a documentary out about Elizabeth Holmes. I had no idea until I stumbled across this trailer, and at first I thought it was a movie. Because it looks like a movie. And I thought this was two actors and one, at least, of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer.
No, it would seem this is indeed the one, the only, the real genuine pure-quill Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy herself. And all I can say is holy crap.
Because she looks nuts. She looks like "I am about to slip some gelsemine into your tea and then sit by your bedside mopping your brow and cooing reassuringly as you slowly succumb to its effects, in the best traditions of the Golden Age of British murder".
It seems to be shot like a film, there has to be a hefty dose of acting going on because the guy playing? being? the director/narrator of the documentary looks like he is acting the part of "guy reacting to something he doesn't trust" with the hanging open mouth and sucking his tongue etc. reaction. But it seems like the filming really was that weird.
Gosh amighty. And there's a small child, a real small child and not "the script needs a baby" child actor, in this and everything. That really makes me concerned, because I would not leave that woman in charge of a goldfish.
The woman was either crazy as a loon or drugged out to the orbit of Pluto, or both. Because that kind of "pop your eyes wide open until the balls nearly fall out and stare unblinkingly and hold that stare for minutes" kind of behaviour, that is not normal.
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades? Did the crazy only come out later?
Because DC money does not understand how Silicon Valley works. Almost all her investors are from DC circles, which makes sense given her pitch. "Female Zuckerberg reinvents medical testing" is a compelling sell to the sufficiently ignorant.
And on paper why couldn't she do it ? On paper Tesla, SpaceX, and Theranos do not look that different from each other : 'Autistic savant finds space with lazy legacy players, blindsides them with a technology leap and cleans house despite expert insistence that the technology simply wasn't there yet.'
Now, if you're from the valley, then you immediately see the folly in that reasoning. If you are YC, A16z or Sequoia, then you get pitched this exact story 20 times a day by an equally talented Stanford dropout. Premier VCs know that the story is for the media, they want to see hard outcomes : Growth (like Facebook before it made its first dollar), Technology (like when Altman showed Satya GPT3) or Revenue. Theranos had none of those, and failed to secure a single tier 1 VC.
Tesla wasn't just ambitious, it was standing on the shoulders of legacy giants who had already made and subsequently canned electric cars because of political pressure more so than technical pressure. Tesla was started at a time when batteries were improving exponentially by the year. Tesla hit the goldilocks zone in so many ways it is incredible. The ambition and the crazy founder were secondary to what was clearly fertile ground for disruption. Compare that to Elon's ill-fated attempts to reinvent trains (hyperloop), tunnels (boring company) or trucks (cybertruck). One may think that Elon's personality is what made him successful. On the contrary, Elon's personality is tolerated so VCs can get in early with tech's clearest technical thinker (alongside Bezos) with a proven record of hitting jackpot about 20% of the time.
Unfortunately, DC investors do not have the keen ability to tell the difference between someone with the right optics vs the true signals that indicate possible success. Holmes' narcissism (bad = ruthless climbing and image management) was mistaken for turbo-autism (good = technical obsession and single minded force of will). Her hyperbolic claims (fraud or naivete) were mistaken for insight. DC elite are used to military projects that make billions vanish without a trace. Spending $1B on seemingly valid breakthrough did not read as fraud. After all, the F-35 wasn't demonstrated for decades after the $50 billion in funding. They were especially gullible given the DC & old-money credentials of the Holmes family.
Probably both.
sure buddy
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Tech VCs regularly yeet money into far dumber stuff than Theranos. Theranos definitely skewed East Coast due to the Healthcare aspect, which is something that Tech generally historically hasn't had that great a taste for and has its own crazy infrastructure of tiny explorer companies and acquisitions.
Is that really the case?
What else do we have that's high profile and obviously physically impossible? Even things like exaggerations of self driving cars are "not quite there yet and not clear when we'd get there" not "impossible."*
*With the caveat that Theranos is obviously impossible without other more eye catching and valuable technologies, not impossible with science fiction technology.
Silicon Valley tends to ignore Hardware as much as possible since it's too expensive, tricky and prone to falsification. YC's kicked out a bunch of companies over the year for straight-up fraud, though.
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This reminds me of the people who talk about 'growth' a lot in government. They're not necessarily stupid people, but they seem to see 'growth' as this thing that just turns up when you prepare the ground right and want it really really badly. It doesn't seem to occur to them that growth might correspond to something: to individual discoveries that compound into innovations, to solving problems that actually exist and actually matter, to synergies that grow up between quality home industries.
Which makes it very difficult for them to tell growth from financialisation.
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A24 is mainly famous for making eerie movies / horror movies. And Elizabeth Holmes comes off as creepy to many people anyway. So it's not surprising that everyone involved would lean into a "horror" tone here, with the disturbing music and close-ups. It's the best path to making money on this movie.
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Indeed, sounds like something out of a story involving rather a different Holmes. Nominative determinism fails?
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Thank you for this. First time I've been really surprised by something all week. IT'S NOT AN ACTRESS trying to seem as untrustworthy as possible. Lmfao.
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First off, that's just a teaser. The full trailer dropped: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvW_N5p1q44
Wealthy Boomer men have been very effectively trained to feel guilty about the opportunities they had that women didn't.
Holmes was very good at making them feel like she's the genius daughter / granddaughter they never had who just needs a chance.
More than that, she's from a well connected family and was born in DC. Her mom was a DC staffer. Her dad worked at USAID and ENRON.
There's a class of DC people who viewed her as "one of our own" getting rich and kicking ass in Silicon Valley.
You can see that when you look at the people who were on her board: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis, and Betsy DeVos.
I don't quite understand how her schtick as a hypnotic alien helped but somehow it did.
Thanks for the link. The comment section is gold, I really liked this one:
Or how the other comment put it:
I am still laughing my ass off over it, a real goldmine in there. Also I unironically think that we may be witnessing a birth of a new hero for Lindsay Clancy's gaggle of lunatics. I'd not be surprised if a few years down the road Holmes is AOCs chosen for vice-president or something like that.
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Emotional derangement can be very magnetic. Many people who interacted with Hitler up close said that he had mesmerizing, hypnotic eyes.
The big eyes also helped with her sex appeal.
Sex appeal plus magnetic eyes plus deep voice plus "autistic genius" personality is a great combination for a woman in her 20s wanting to be taken seriously by people who have a lot of money.
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Okay, the full thing is more normal. But this really is a woman putting on a performance so constantly that I don't think she knows herself what's true or not. She has that "this is how a person who is [in X situation] would react, so I react like that" aura about her, which leads to the uncanny effect.
It looks like a very interesting production after all. The truth (or part of it) may be that Holmes has something off-balance about her but genuinely convinced herself that she was not scamming, that this would all work out, that she did not lie and deceive, and so she is convinced of her own innocence. But she is so removed from reality that she has trouble connecting with normal people, and this was her attempt at explaining herself.
That, or she and her partner really are accomplished liars and con artists.
That, or as the comment from the gold mine of youtube comment section put it more succintly:
In related(?) Zuckerberg news, him and the missus are throwing money at local sports clubs now they are going to be lords of the manor round these parts:
It does make me laugh because I think the guy would not know a hurley if you bet him over the head with it, and they don't need to buy goodwill because the locals in them parts are well used to tugging the forelock to the big house (the Duke of Devonshire has a little summer place there) or at least being very happy with how their bread is buttered once rich outsiders come in to buy and do up manor houses. Still, all donations gratefully received, even if I think this is Mark downloading programming about "how do flesh units integrate into local communities?" and learning all about the importance that the lowly sons of toil place on activities like sports, so supporting sports aids in gaining popularity for their new overlords 😁
Another funny part to me is the revival in local cricket clubs due to the influx of Indian/Pakistani immigrants to Ireland; formerly a garrison sport, now the established local clubs are featuring new members and good luck to them!
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The generous take is that Holmes tried to apply the silicon valley "fake it till you make it" strategy and got in way over her head. Then she just stubbornly kept pushing forward hoping everything would work out.
This was John Carreyrou's take in his book, and he wasn't very sympathetic.
It fits really well with the anecdotes littered in the book about her obsession with Jobs.
It all fits the image of a very immature , mentally ill person who thought she could just push through.
The real question is what the fuck Sunny Balwani was thinking.
The eye contact during a blow job must’ve been next level
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Two things:
Nathan Fielder is involved with this. This immediately makes it questionable how much of this is a documentary vs. a movie and what genre it is, also how much Holmes is involved in the "joke." If you don't know who Nathan is I really recommend looking into it, a few YouTubers have multi hour long videos that make you question reality. The guy is doing some really interesting performance art and/or is a wild person.
Holmes was always part of the take adjacent delusion complex. The technology was very obviously physically impossible to anyone with a science background, so like many scams you immediately filtered off anybody with any sense, so everyone involved was an idiot or profoundly desperate to find a blond female tech savant.
Indeed. Nathan For You vibes are strong with the teaser.
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The trailer is only a few minutes long, and of course the way it's shot and scored and presented makes it look like a movie. So the impressions we are/I am getting are those the film makers want us to get.
But seemingly they really did invite in this crew:
So this really is Holmes doing her utmost best to be appealing and charming and "I'm being real, I'm being honest, I'm not hiding anything" and instead looking completely uncanny. Why did she and her partner do this? Why did they think it a good idea? Clearly when she was shopping around for someone to make a film or piece about her, the idea was to create propaganda (if possible) about her being a pure-hearted blossom who only had the best of sincere intentions and it all somehow went sideways. But this? Invite them in before she goes to jail, then they keep hanging around for three years, and out comes the most uncanny of valleys in the shape of the trailer?
I genuinely thought this was a docudrama with an actress playing her, brilliantly conveying how unhinged she was, but with a lot of artistic licence going on. Nope, this is the real lady showing us how unhinged she is.
I find this hard to believe. Both seasons of The Rehearsal we're about him inserting himself into the story he's documenting. I think it's a big part of what makes his art so good; blurring the like between documentarian and documentee (?) is the point.
That said, those chilling shots of Holmes looking like a sociopath... I think the effect is really increased by the magic of filmmaking. Close-ups, cuts between faces that potentially extend the timing of awkward silences.. the music in the background. All documentaries should be taken with a hefty serving of salt.
This is why I generally hate all but the most lighthearted and inconsequential of documentaries. Half the information of a book/long article, but chock full of every emotional manipulation trick in Hollywood's arsenal. It's like eating a survival ration where half the calories were replaced with cigarettes.
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Based off what he did with airplanes my guess is that he told her she would be able to rewrite her story and tell it "how it really was" and he'll manipulate her into getting an interesting product that she may or may not realize is dangerous to her and crazy (because of her presumed/likely personality disorder).
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For those unaware, Nathan Fielder is the guy who did the sort-of-comedy/sort-of-serious show Nathan For You where he would give businesses outlandish business strategies to try out. Like a gas station offering ridiculously cheap gas, with the catch being you had to fill out a rebate form and deliver it to a drop box at the peak of some mountain in a national park two hours away.
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Can you point me to the YouTube videos. Sounds right up my alley. I like Nathan fielder but I’m not expert.
Super Eyepatch Wolf did a long one, I feel like someone else did too but I can't remember who it was.
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Sort of. Fielder makes one-of-a-kind shows and movies by putting non-actors in very unusual situations surrounded by improv actors and then weaving their genuine words and actions into the narrative he wants to tell. People talking about the shows get confused only because the primary improv actor is him, playing a fictionalized version of himself, and he almost always plays that character in public appearances.
What makes the documentary so interesting is that the "real person" in this case is walking into the whole situation open-eyed about who Nathan is and what he does. What narrative does he plan to create given that situation? How successful will he be going up against her desire to tell her own story the way she wants it to be understood?
I see what you did there.
To answer the question seriously, I don't think you need to try very hard to get someone like Madoff or SBF or Holmes to dig themselves a hole after they've been exposed. Just sit and record them trying to explain why what they did wasn't a scam.
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I am not a personal consumer of his content but I've heard in commentary on him that it deliberately makes it unclear what is a joke, what's him being awkward, what is him pretending to be awkward etc.
This means even if you know what he does it is easy to get thrown off since what is and isn't a character is blurred.
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People overestimate how canny these rich people are versus lucky. Also people who are really smart and good at something are still usually only good at one thing. Many of them are quite happy to hop on the hype train if other hard-nosed business people believe in the project. It's not like any of these people know anything about blood testing, but if Walgreens and Larry Ellison thinks it's the real deal why shouldn't they follow suit?
Also also, SV is overflowing with people flinging money at questionable ideas, the vast majority of which fail. Theranos blew up because it was massive, long-running fraud, not just vaporware. (And biomedical tech fraud has higher stakes than "our productivity software package is shit.")
Nope
This. Larry Ellison is not some genius stock trader who turned a hundred dollar inheritance to 200 billions. Instead, pretty much like Gates, he made his fortune by investing in and leading one software company over decades, and having luck (and competence, and ruthlessness) on his side.
Just because you are in the top percentile of "running a software company", that does not mean that you are some genius stock-picker. Additionally, if the feedback you get from the universe is "on average, your deals are going great, you are one of the richest people alive due to your business decisions", a common side effect of that is overconfidence. Besides, the stock market is probably the only place where Ellison can experience the thrill of gambling, it is not like he can go to Vegas and bet a billion on a single number.
In short, just because someone is very rich that does not mean they are a professional investor, just as someone being very tall does not mean that they are an NBA player.
My world model would be that the people who are actually good at investing are working for Goldman Sachs and the like. If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.
Naah, dont make a comparison to Gates.
Gates was insanely intelligent, in that he was intelligent and he was insane. I worked for Microsoft, and personally know people who knew Bill. So these are 1st hand accounts. Dude was insane. He was reading 24x7, while walking, pooping and....driving. (as told to me by someone who was unfortunate enough to sit beside him in his Porsche 911 that he drove while reading at the same time). He was as obsessive as Jobs, and had temper tantrums about 10x of what Jobs was famous for.
Gates' mad-man persona was sanitized through his seasoned veteran image created during his non-profit foundation era. But Bill-Gates was a genius. There are no 2 ways around it.
Ofc, it helped that he was born in a top 0.01 percentile privileged household. He was definitely the first child in Seattle to use a computer.
Perfect trifecta of luck, nepotism and talent.
Your general point is still correct, but I get a sense that Gates legacy gets overlooked because of his deliberate revisionism.
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It’s funny you cite height. Do you know the odds of playing in the nba if you are 7 feet tall or higher? They are multiple orders of magnitude better than if you are below 6 feet tall.
So it is with rich people. Who is a better investor: random GS VP or Peter Thiel?
Funny too because it’s been 20 years since GS was a training ground for investors. They basically closed down all their investing capabilities post Dodd-Frank. Now it’s various forms of professional services. You use to see a bunch of hedge funds come from their ranks but without prop trading those days ended.
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I mean plenty of elite professional traders get blindsided by big macro happenings since they're overfocused on the stock price as a signal. Theranos did never go public (partly due to the fraud involved making it hard to get through audit), though, so limited scope to be traded as well. My professional background is essentially VIP services for Online Casino so I meet a lot of crazy, crazy rich people and I do 100% believe that sheer aggression and compulsive all-inness is probably the most required trait to be superduper rich. It's very hard to snowball into that level of money out of sheer smarts if you have reasonable bankroll management.
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Oh my God.
I know it's said she admired Steve Jobs so much she tried to turn herself into a clone of him with the black turtlenecks, but that is pure Zuckerberg "Hello I am an android" mimicry going on there.
Is everyone in Silicon Valley batshit insane? Does this pass for normal there?
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I saw a clip of this trailer and also just assumed it was from a TV show and they were actors--maybe something shot in a mock documentary style. The incongruence between her eyes and smile, and the way she holds that expression with the tilting head is highly unsettling. At that moment, I think she really believes herself when she says that she's always honest.
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I had the same reaction. I thought it was a faked-up overdone reenactment and it was quickly out of my mind. A little later someone pointed out that it was actually a real interview with Holmes (her look has changed a lot), and it instantly turned it into a must watch for me.
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One of my old co-workers was an early FTX employee and I got a lot of proxy exposure to a network of huge-money Crypto and Tech people as a result.
A lot of them are kinda nuts to be honest. Becoming a Billionaire is more about aggression and tenacity than brilliance, since way better to either have a pretty-good idea and charge like a bull or just be a serial idea-haver and hope for the best instead of being a perfectionist. Plus in Holmes case the whole impending judgement, cameras being present, small child sleep deprivation stuff is likely compounding her inherent nature.
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She is an actor, pretending in real life, even if her pretend self is her real self. It’s a continuous performance - a continuous grift, except it’s no longer really a grift, because now you’re getting what’s on the tin, a documentary about a pathological con woman.
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A lot of hard-nosed business people are actually pretty bad at sniffing out fraud even if they try. Furthermore, a lot of them simply don't give a fuck. Venture capitalists make a lot of bets. They expect most of them to not pay out, and for the few that do pay out to more than cover the bad bets. Mahayoshi Son of SoftBank is probably the best example of that. If the reason the bet didn't pay out is because of fraud, that's not really much different than it failing to pay out because of internal failures or acts of God. After all, you did your due diligence. You met with the founders and they made all the right mouth noises while pointing at a hockey stick graph projected onto the wall. You couldn't have possibly known there was a fraud going on, so you face no unique downside.
That just seems like throwing away free alpha. If the average legitimate venture capital investment opportunity generates such high returns in expectation that it can make up for rampant fraud, then a fraud-savvy investor could earn even greater returns by discriminating and getting these lucrative opportunities without the fraudulent ones weighing them down. Even if you can't avoid internal failures or acts of God, every case that you do nonrandomly avoid is free money.
Maybe the riskiest ideas with the greatest potential for growth sound fake. Refusing to bet on possible grifts may also filter out some of the best startups. That's not necessarily true, but if something like it is then a savvy investor could be insensitive to scams.
Also your ability to profit is based on market sentiment not the actual reality of these projects. A fully rational investor is going to miss out on a lot of hypebubble money.
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Yeah but if you manage to completely sniff out everything that's fraudulent you're probably costing yourself since there's sufficient businesses that start fraudulent/have intervening periods of insolvency that they make it through via bloodymindedness, nobody calling their bluff and market exuberance. Plus however you want to diagnose companies that lurch around from an original okay-but-not-great idea and end up landing on something that works later on. If you were smart enough to not invest in the original idea, you may have missed out on the second iteration.
Also sufficient 'regulatory arbitrage' cases in business where it's just a fight to the death between regulators and spurious crazy people. Uber seems to have worked. Maybe Kalshi/Polymarket work or don't work out in the end but the fraudulence ratio has swung around wildly throughout the whole enterprise.
Early in Microsoft they had OS builds filled with fatal bugs. Practically unusable software. Bill Gates would demo it to potential customers and investors. He carefully avoided the many actions that would crash it and falsely presented it as working. His software demos really impressed people. Later they mostly fixed the bugs and delivered something like working software to customers.
Citation needed!
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Firefly (the meeting transcription / note takes service) being the most recent and relevant example. The CEO literally used to join calls as "Firefly AI" and make the notes by hand, but now the product works and it's great.
Yeah plenty of stories like that with elements of faking it till you make it plus these days hard to have a genuine moat in most SAAS vaporware startups so being crazy and willing to push the envelope is a ton of how one of 500 fairly-identical companies comes out of the melee.
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It's also worth pointing out that the "avoid the weirdos" heuristic is probably an actively counterproductive strategy for a VC. You avoid Holmes types, but you also avoid Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Altman, Amodei, Musk types. Since the latter group is where VCs take the large majority of their profits, they'd be reduced to a bunch of small, conventional bets that don't sustain the model.
Yeah. Plus when times are good there's massive laudatory portraits of 'how weird our misunderstood genius is but we managed to look past it and made money with SBF'
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