At the height of her acclaim in 2015, Elizabeth Holmes was once known as the “female Steve Jobs” with her revolutionary idea of what would have changed the medical world forever. But the more attention she and her company “Theranos” got through the many public appearances with magazines and news sites stating her great inventions, the more the truth uncovered about her “great” creation.
Huge media conglomerates named her the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire”, and Time’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2015. With her rising fame and the amount of attention she got, investors started to pour their money and live savings into what would have been a huge business potential. Theranos was last valued at around $9 billion, making Holmes the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, worth about $4.5 billion. When the truth about her scam was unveiled, many jobs were lost, investments were lost and this resulted in many ongoing lawsuits that Holmes and her start-up are still facing today.
This event relates to Baudrillard’s hyperreality tenet, where no one questioned Theranos’ inventions until one of the only journalists, John Carreyrou, a recalcitrant healthcare reporter from The Wall Street Journal investigated in depth the secretive operations of Theranos. When the news blew up about Theranos’ questionable technology, employees were still believing in what they were working on, chanting “F*ck you, Carreyrou! F*ck. You. Carrey-rou!”. Shows how people were unable to distinguish from the reality of this technology is faulty and just an unrealistic prompt made by a 19-year-old Standford dropout and the simulation of it being able to test for 150 different tests with only just a finger prick of blood. Making celebrated and respected female entrepreneurs able to mislead the whole world about her company.
After the truth got uncovered in the Wall Street Journal published article in 2015, it not only affects people but also how media covers tech companies and Silicon Valley. Resulting in investigations into Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election, as well as scandals at Uber and a series of #MeToo accusations. We can clearly see the effect of this event on people as well as the media’s view of tech companies and the tech industry in general.
Without the media’s huge role in making Holmes's company seem legit, many of the investors wouldn’t have handed their money into a questionable company. Many were intrigued by positive articles like Fortune’s to believe that they made the right decision to be a part of a scam. This goes to show how media coverage can turn coal into gold and mislead the whole world into believing in a piece of technology that did not exist.
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