The Endangering Angel
A Review of the HBO documentary by Alex Gibney, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) on Elizabeth Holmes and her now defunct visionary startup, Theranos
There is an iconic image of Elizabeth Holmes that keeps recurring in The Inventor… Clad in black turtleneck she holds between her fingers the ‘nanotainer’, the small capsule-like container with just a few drops of blood. She stares at the camera reminiscent of the image of her idol Steve Jobs holding the iPhone. It eloquently conveys the myth of Theranos as the hottest startup founded by the next Steve Jobs.
Different market
Emulating Steve Jobs is risky in a market such as medical diagnosis. This is a highly regulated field needing FDA approval for new products. Theranos developed ‘Edison’ for carrying out tests with a few drops of capillary blood taken from the finger as against the normal way of drawing a much larger quantity from a vein with a needle and syringe (called venipuncture). While it sounded revolutionary like a smartphone replacing a mainframe computer, it was still in the realm of science fiction as Edison was forever a work in progress. Theranos was alleged to have practiced the Silicon Valley art of ‘fake it till you make it’ by using commercial analyzers, drawing a relatively smaller quantity of blood through venipuncture to keep up the charade of using less blood. The company was accused of endangering lives as the blood had to be diluted causing inaccurate results.
Endless Struggle
The employees claimed that they were forced to work for long hours in an atmosphere of intimidation and made to leave if they didn’t toe the line. They have complained that they were threatened with litigation and ruin, if they disclosed any information about the company. Even after 15 years, Theranos was nowhere near coming up with a reliable product. It was like the doomed Spanish expedition in search of the fabled El Dorado, the city of gold, in Werner Herzog’s German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Just as the Spanish soldier Aguirre led a group of conquistadores down the dangerous Amazon river, Holmes took her employees on a latter-day California Gold Rush.
Company exposed
Theranos had an “all-star board” comprising powerful people such as George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and the much-feared litigator David Boies. The company operated in stealth mode unquestioned till it was exposed by John Carreyrou of Wall Street Journal in 2015. Carreyrou published a detailed investigation of Theranos in his book “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” which reads like a thriller. Tyler Shultz, the grandson of George Shultz, defied his grandfather and revealed what went on in Theranos, spending about half a million dollars in legal cost to fight the law suits filed by the company against him. Erika Cheung was another whistle blower who wrote to the regulator (CMS). The company, once valued at 9 billion dollars, shut down its operations in 2018. Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the President and COO with whom Holmes was reported to have been romantically involved, were charged for fraud.
How does The Inventor… fare?
Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary struck gold when the 100 hours of the video footage, originally shot by Theranos, got leaked. Gibney is known for his documentaries on Enron and Scientology. Compared to ABC’s podcast and documentary, Gibney’s documentary ranks higher as he takes an ambivalent view of Holmes. He doesn’t portray her as a fraudster like Bernie Madoff. In his opinion Holmes “had a noble vision that is why she was able to lie so effectively”.
Surprisingly, there is something striking in Carreyrou’s book, “Bad Blood…” that has not been taken up in Gibney’s interview with Carreyrou. Holmes was supposed to have told the employees that “she was building a religion and if there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave”. Theranos sounds somewhat like a religious cult as it demanded faith from its employees. Resonating with the title of Gibney’s favorite Luis Buñuel film, The Exterminating Angel, the protagonist of Gibney’s documentary was perhaps the endangering angel who could not be dislodged without the grave risk taken by some of the employees. This is the disturbing aspect of the Theranos story.
