This morning, Forbes made a big announcement. Tech darling Elizabeth Holmes—the founder of the disgraced blood-testing firm Theranos—is no longer a multi-billionaire. Instead, Forbes estimates, she’s now worth “nothing.” This is a delicious scoop of schadenfreude, but it’s one that nonetheless obscures that Holmes was always actually worth, to use Forbes’ term, nothing.
Last October, the Wall Street Journal popped the reputation of Theranos, a much buzzed-about biotech startup that claimed to have revolutionized blood testing. As it turned out, their claims were not true—they simply hadn’t done what they’d claimed they’d done. Now, the mildly disgraced firm’s CEO is stumping for the Clinton campaign.
Theranos, a $9 billion Silicon Valley startup that says it can run a full range of lab tests using mere drops of blood instead of whole vials, came under fire this month after the Wall Street Journal reported the vast majority of the company’s tests were run on traditional machines, not groundbreaking new technology. Now Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has promised to release data that will purportedly prove her company’s tech works.
The Wall Street Journal diaspora was divided by an ocean; coastal wine writers were divided by an assumption-filled land mass; and Harvey Weinstein and his interviewer re-divided the responsibilities. The Twitterati were geographically fractious.
