Elizabeth Holmes: From CEO to criminal

Summary

Good Bad Billionaire – "Elizabeth Holmes: From CEO to Criminal"

Podcast: Good Bad Billionaire, BBC World Service
Hosts: Simon Jack & Zing Tsjeng
Date: February 16, 2026
Episode Focus: The spectacular rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos and once the youngest self-made female billionaire, whose company promised to revolutionize blood testing—only to become one of the most notorious scandals in Silicon Valley history.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores the journey of Elizabeth Holmes: her upbringing, the founding and rapid growth of Theranos, the company’s eventual implosion following revelations of fraud, and Holmes's criminal conviction. The hosts scrutinize what drove Holmes, how she amassed extraordinary power and wealth, the cultural and psychological factors at play, and the fallout for investors, patients, and Silicon Valley at large. At the episode's close, they debate whether Holmes was good, bad, or "just another billionaire."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: Family, Ambition, and Early Promise

• Holmes’s distinguished family background: Washington insider parents and a lineage featuring inventors, generals, and faded Gilded Age wealth.
• Driven from an early age to achieve greatness — and explicitly focused on wealth:

  “At a family party, a young Elizabeth was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up... She said, a billionaire. And when someone suggested, you know, Elizabeth, maybe you could try being president, she said, no, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.” (Simon Jack, 04:24)

• Holmes excelled at school, described as determined but indifferent to social embarrassment, and attended Stanford as a President Scholar in chemical engineering.

2. Genesis of the Theranos Dream

• Sparked by work in Singapore during the SARS outbreak, Holmes conceived a less invasive blood-testing device.
• Dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos, quickly winning the support of influential professor Dr. Channing Robertson:

  “I think there are people who are the Mozarts and the Beethovens and the Newtons, the Einsteins and the Da Vincis who come along rarely in a generation. It was becoming more and more clear to me that she had it.” (Robertson, via Simon Jack, 07:32)

• Initial idea—a diagnostic patch—proved unworkable, leading to Theranos’s first “pivot”: a tabletop device using a single blood drop.

3. Startup Mania & Fundraising Frenzy

• Holmes raised millions with striking ease, leveraging connections, the Silicon Valley boom, and the allure of a prodigy founder:

  “If you don’t have the connections to back you up with cash, then you’re just some schmuck in a bar talking about the next big thing. And Elizabeth was not that person.” (Simon Jack, 10:17)

• Rapid escalation: $6 million by age 20, jumpstarting Theranos’s valuation to $30 million (early 2005).

4. Early Warning Signs & the Culture of Secrecy

• Fundraising pitch decks were heavy on style and market promise, light on technical detail:

  “It’s all about getting the money rather than proving that the actual product works.” (Zing Tsjeng, 14:40)

• Board stacked with high-profile, non-technical figures (Don Lucas, Larry Ellison, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz).
• The first evidence of deliberate deception: faked test results in early demos; dissenters (e.g., CFO, scientists) dismissed or pressured out.

  “The reality of the company’s product and the fundraising narrative begin to slightly diverge. To protect this narrative, anyone raising doubts was not welcome.” (Zing Tsjeng, 15:59)

5. Scaling Up: Cult of Personality and Escalating Deceit

• Holmes styled herself after Steve Jobs—black turtlenecks, charismatic presentations, even voice modulation—while projecting a visionary image.
• Internally, staff management was fraught: Balwani “played the bad cop,” and the culture became fear-driven.

  “Firings were so frequent employees darkly joked that Sunny disappeared them like some sort of mafia boss.” (Zing Tsjeng, 20:55)

• Deals made with Walgreens and Safeway, despite the fact that Theranos machines were unreliable, nonfunctional, or simply using off-the-shelf devices for most tests.

6. The Bubble Bursts: Investigations and Exposé

• Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou (author of Bad Blood) revealed the sham, exposing that Theranos technology failed to perform as claimed.
• Holmes’s public response: denial, legal threats, and a widely repeated refrain:

  “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.” (Holmes, on CNBC’s Mad Money, 35:35)

• Regulatory authorities shut down Theranos’s core operations after finding its products endangered patient health.

7. Collapse and Consequences

• Investors, both billionaire and “everyday” people, lost fortunes; patients suffered emotional and medical abuse from faulty blood results.
• Holmes and Balwani indicted and eventually convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy:

  “In January 2022 [Holmes] was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors. She was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison and ordered to pay part of a $452 million restitution.” (Zing Tsjeng, 38:14)

• Holmes’s net worth fell from $4.5 billion to zero nearly overnight.
• Personal fallout described: public disgrace, outstanding debts, and new family circumstances.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Early Motivation:

  “She said, a billionaire... the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.”
  — Simon Jack (04:24)

• About Charisma and Deception:

  “There is this kind of odd charisma... you kind of feel, well, she’s clearly a bit of an odd, but she believes in it.”
  — Simon Jack (18:28)

• Workplace Culture:

  “Firings were so frequent employees darkly joked that Sunny disappeared them like some sort of mafia boss.”
  — Zing Tsjeng (20:55)

• On Startup Groupthink:

  “There’s probably a really interesting academic paper to be done into the effect of groupthink in funding rounds.”
  — Simon Jack (19:09)

• Public Image vs. Reality:

  “By 2013, Theranos had assembled one of the most impressive boards in Silicon Valley... Former US Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger... but not biotech experts.”
  — Simon Jack (27:14)

• Collapse:

  “Fortune magazine had Elizabeth on the cover... Theranos now had a valuation of $9 billion. … But at the same time, Theranos lab director Adam Rosenoff was telling Elizabeth that some of the tests had unreliable results. He later said she seemed pretty calm about the whole thing. She didn’t seem to share my level of alarm.”
  — Zing Tsjeng (29:42)

• Reflection on the Tragedy:

  “It’s interesting, I was more moved by the woman who’d lost $150,000 in her life savings and the guy lost 1.2 million... It’s different when it’s medical technology... it’s those people, I think, who got swindled into, you know, believing in this, who lost big parts of their personal net worth. For everyone else, it’s part of the game.”
  — Zing Tsjeng (48:32)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Segment Description | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:24 | Opening: Holmes quitting Stanford; creation of Theranos | | 03:15 | Early life, family background, personal ambition | | 06:27 | Stanford years, origin of the Theranos idea | | 09:19 | First fundraising, Silicon Valley context, early valuation ($30M) | | 12:08 | Product pivots, fundraising momentum, and early tech skepticism | | 15:29 | Faked demos, internal dissent, the beginnings of deception | | 17:04 | Formation of "the Edison," shift from core invention, persistence of misleading investors | | 19:19 | Entry of Sunny Balwani, cultural shift, "cult of Jobs" | | 21:23 | Walgreens and Safeway deals, persistent secrecy ("stealth mode") | | 25:03 | Walgreens and Safeway rollouts, reality behind the curtain (outsourcing test results) | | 26:06 | Chief Scientist Ian Gibbons’ concerns and tragic death | | 27:14 | Star-studded board, public image, disconnect from technical competence | | 29:42 | Media fawning, private jets, and the billionaire lifestyle after the tech's failings became obvious | | 34:28 | The Wall Street Journal exposé, initial denials, and Holmes’s defiant public statements | | 35:50 | Regulatory crackdown, collapse of Walgreens and Safeway partnerships, Theranos’s crash | | 38:14 | Indictments, convictions, and sentencing of Holmes and Balwani | | 39:34 | Investor and patient losses—financial fallout | | 40:57 | The scoring segment: Wealth, controversy, philanthropy, power, legacy | | 47:22 | Broader reflections on startup culture, gender, and the “fake it till you make it” ethos in Silicon Valley | | 49:19 | Final reflections and open questions about Holmes’s intent (delusion vs. grifting) |

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The Hosts' (Playful) Verdicts

• Wealth:
  Holmes was a self-made billionaire "at her peak," but spectacular collapse earns her a 6/10 from both hosts.

• Controversy:
  Full marks for being “one of the greatest cautionary tales in tech.” (Both hosts: 10/10)

• Philanthropy:
  No evidence she gave back, earnestly or otherwise. (Both: 0/10)

• Legacy and Power:
  Immense—her tale is a case study and serves as a lasting warning in business schools and startup circles. (7/10—Zing; 8/10—Simon)

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Closing Reflections

• The story is uniquely Silicon Valley: astronomical hype, groupthink, ambition, and ruthless “cult of the founder” culture colliding with life-and-death stakes.
• Unanswered questions linger: Was Holmes a true believer, deluded by optimism and runaway ambition, or a knowing fraudster from the start?

  “Did she realize that the tech was just not working and maybe would never work... Or did she know all along...and therefore she was just a grifter?” (Simon Jack, 49:19)

• The episode ends by inviting listeners to contribute their own judgments and thoughts.

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Listener Feedback & Next Episode Tease

• Listeners from Ghana and Canada weigh in on previous billionaire stories, with some light-hearted banter about “almond peeling.”
• Next up: Larry Ellison, Oracle founder and billionaire notorious for flamboyance and ruthlessness.

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Recommended for:

• Anyone interested in Silicon Valley, business ethics, startup psychology, biotechnology, gender and power, or modern cautionary tales.
• Listeners seeking insight into how ambition, charisma, and delusion can combine to drive both innovation—and immense deception.

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Sources Credited:

• John Carreyrou, Bad Blood (referenced throughout)
• The Dropout podcast (ABC News) and Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor
• Extensive research and journalism from the BBC, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal

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Contact:
To share your own verdict—good, bad, or just another billionaire—email [e-mail] or text/WhatsApp [phone].

Transcript

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Simon Jack]

It's March 2004. A 19 year old chemical engineering student walks into a professor's office at Stanford.

[Zing Singh]

She's quitting Stanford to build a patch that can diagnose illness and deliver treatment. An idea that sounds more sci fi than startup.

[Simon Jack]

He sighs he doesn't want her to drop out, but he is intrigued. Her approach to complex problems is unlike anything he's ever seen.

[Zing Singh]

After listening and seeing her enthusiasm, he tells her to go for it. And he he accepts a seat on the company's board.

[Simon Jack]

That company is called Theranos and it's about to take Silicon Valley and the world by storm. But its meteoric rise won't last.

[Zing Singh]

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

[Simon Jack]

We take them from zero to their first million, then from a million onto a billion.

[Zing Singh]

I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

[Simon Jack]

And I'm Zing Singh and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

[Zing Singh]

And that student, the was Elizabeth Holmes. Once hailed as the next Steve Jobs, complete with black turtlenecks. Market disrupting ideas. By 30 she was crowned the world's youngest self made female billionaire. With a net worth of four and a half billion dollars.

[Simon Jack]

Her company promised to revolutionize health care, offering over 200 blood tests from just a single drop of blood. And she raised over $900 million from investors including Rupert Murdoch and Larry ellison.

[Zing Singh]

But in 2015, a Wall Street Journal expose revealed the truth. The tech didn't work and the promises were fiction.

[Simon Jack]

Next, Holmes was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison. And her net worth slashed from $4.5 billion to zero.

[Zing Singh]

Wow. So how did she go from being teenage prodigy to biotech billionaire and then to inmate?

[Simon Jack]

Let's rewind and take Elizabeth Holmes from zero to her very first.

[Zing Singh]

Elizabeth Ann Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. her father, Christian Holmes IV, held senior roles in various U.S. government agencies, and her mother, Noel, worked on Capitol Hill. Both sides of Elizabeth's family were packed with people who'd achieved great things.

[Simon Jack]

On her father's side, the Fleischmann Yeast fortune and a pioneering doctor who founded the University of Cincinnati medical school. And on her mother's side, a top Pentagon official. And further back, even a general who had served under Napoleon. Talk about a lineage.

[Zing Singh]

Blimey. Holmes family had once been very wealthy, but her father said that the fortune had faded thanks to alcoholism, multiple marriages in earlier generations. And Elizabeth told the New Yorker magazine, I grew up with these stories about greatness and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful and what happens to them when they make that choice.

[Simon Jack]

John Cariou, whose award winning book Bad Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup has been one of the sources for this episode. He reported that at a family party, a young Elizabeth was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. And her answer was, not astronaut or scientist or physicist.

[Zing Singh]

It was or even millionaire.

[Simon Jack]

Or even millionaire. No, she said, a billionaire. She wanted to be a billionaire. And when someone suggested, you know, Elizabeth, maybe you could try being president, she said, no, the president will marry me because I'll have a billion dollars.

[Zing Singh]

She was a bit of a child prodigy. She told the New Yorker she read Moby Dick, which is a big book for those who don't know it from start to finish. When she was 9, and she tried to design a time machine when she was 7, she said, the wonderful thing about the way I was Ra is that no one ever told me that I couldn't do these things.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, it's interesting that she said she wanted to be a billionaire at that age, because I think if you rewind, this was in the 90s, and I think there were only about 300 billionaires in the world.

[Zing Singh]

It was a rarefied thing Billionaire status is, well, as we know from this program, widespread, but no, then it was a very rare beast indeed.

[Simon Jack]

Well, as a teenager, Elizabeth's family moved to Houston, Texas for her father's new job at Tenneco and then at Enron, which she later lost when that company collapsed. Elizabeth and her brother Christian enrolled at St. John's School, which was one of the top private schools in Texas. And in her second year, she really threw herself into school. She worked late into the night to become a straight A student.

[Zing Singh]

So hard worker. She hasn't really talked about any hobbies or interests as a child, but she was on her school's athletics team. A teammate was interviewed for ABC News the Dropout podcast, and explained that Elizabeth often came last when she was in the long distance races. But she said Elizabeth wasn't really bothered by people laughing at her or people crossing the field because she was so far behind. She was going to run that RA and finish it, determined to do it no matter what anybody said. So some interesting character traits there. And that determination got her into, well, our old friend and billionaire seeding birthing ground. Kress Kressh, Stanford University.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, she got onto Stanford's college level Mandarin courses while she was still at high school. This is going to become increasingly important in the story, so park that in your mind. In 2002, she also secured a place at Stanford as a chemical engineering major. She was also a President scholar, which is really prestigious. That earned her a $3,000 grant to work on research project.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, so she's an academic bombshell. As a freshman, she persuaded Professor Channing Robinson to let her work in his lab, an opportunity usually reserved for graduate students. That summer, her fluency in Mandarin helped her get an internship at a lab in Singapore testing specimens for sars. Remember that? And the samples were collected using syringes and nasal swabs, which got her thinking about less invasive methods of taking samples.

[Simon Jack]

Back in the States, she spent five days and nights with her mum, just popping in to give her food, drafting a patent for a skin patch that could diagnose illness and deliver treatment. And her design used something called microfluidics, which is a field focused on moving tiny amounts of liquid through micro channels. Now, at the time, it showed promise in lab settings, but using it in a wearable device for real time diagnosis and drug delivery, that was well ahead of what the science had actually achieved. And when Elizabeth showed it to one professor at Stanford, they were unconvinced that it could actually ever work. But when she showed it to Channing, Robertson. He encouraged her to keep developing the idea.

[Zing Singh]

In March 2004, Elizabeth decided to quit Stanford in proper billionaire style. To pursue her idea full time. She asked Professor Robertson to join her new company as a board member. He agreed. And that is the moment we opened this episode with. Robertson later told Bloomberg's Businessweek magazine. I think there are people who are the Mozarts and the Beethovens and the Newtons, the Einsteins and the Da Vinci's who come along rarely in a generation. It was becoming more and more clear to me that she had it well.

[Simon Jack]

To get her start up off the ground, Elizabeth began fundraising close to home. So her parents gave her the money. They'd save her a college fund. Several relatives invested as well, and she created a 26 page pitch deck for the Therapatch. And this patch, she explained, would use micro needles to painlessly draw blood, analyze it using a microchip, and then deliver the precise amount of medicine needed. Now, I'm no medical technologist, but already this is starting to sound a little bit far fetched.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, I don't know, I mean, if you think that you can apply patches to push stuff in, like nicotine patches, if you can use a patch to push stuff through the skin that way, maybe you can use a patch, just pull stuff out the other way.

[Simon Jack]

But all in one. I don't know, how big is this patch going to be?

[Zing Singh]

Let's see how this goes, shall we? Still on the hunt for funding, Elizabeth called her childhood friend's father, Tim Draper, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. People who put money in early stages. He'd been an early investor, for example, in Hotmail. Draper was impressed. He became one of her first investors, put in a million dollars. Elizabeth then approached family, friends. And Professor Robertson put her in touch with some funders too. All told, by early 2005, at the age of 20, without a degree, Elizabeth had raised $6 million. And Theranos itself was now valued at $30 million.

[Simon Jack]

Now, if you're listening to this and you're scratching your head and thinking raising millions this quickly came surprisingly easy for a 20 year old dropout. Maybe it's worth reminding you of the kind of free brow ATM that Elizabeth was working on at that moment in time.

[Zing Singh]

Definitely. So we've had the dot com boom and bust where, you know, fortunes were made and fortunes were lost. 2004 was something of a comeback year. People from the PayPal mafia, as it's known. Peter Thiel, for example, made his angel investment of $500,000 in Facebook. If you want to know more about Thiel. Fascinating story. We've covered him. In another episode, we also had the Google IPO that was actually a massive success. Just gave that feeling that Silicon Valley was getting back in gear. Confidence was return. And everyone knew that from the wreckage of the dot com bust, massive companies were going to emerge and people didn't want to miss out on the ones when they did. She's, you know, a prodigy. She's dropped out of Stanford. She's ticking a lot of boxes here and massively well connected.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, I think this is it. You know, it's one thing to have a good idea, but if you don't have the connections to back you up with cash, then you're just some schmuck in a bar talking about the next big thing.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah.

[Simon Jack]

And Elizabeth was not that person.

[Zing Singh]

No, for sure.

[Simon Jack]

So although Elizabeth $6 million was raised to fund her startup, by the beginning of 2005, it's safe for us to say that she is now a millionaire.

[Zing Singh]

So let us take Elizabeth Holmes from a million to a billion.

[Simon Jack]

Elizabeth hired a small team. She set up shop in a rundown part of Silicon Valley. It was actually so run down that her car window was once shattered by a STR bullet on her way into the office. So, you know, this wasn't the kind of glitzy, glamorous Facebook campuses that we know of in Silicon Valley. Elizabeth was working on the patch. And after further research, she saw that it just didn't work. So she just quickly pivoted.

[Zing Singh]

The blood would be collected in a kind of cartridge about the size of a credit card. You'd insert this card into a tabletop machine that would then use the microfluidics we talked about to process that sample. You would then send the results wirelessly to doctors who could immediately have a look at it and help patients. Now at home, blood monitors are already around. Anyone who's diabetic will know this. Think of those handheld glucose meters. But Elizabeth imagined device that could run dozens of different lab tests for lots of different conditions, all from a single drop of blood.

[Simon Jack]

So it's not quite the patch, but I still think a machine that you just need a single drop of blood for is quite attractive to people.

[Zing Singh]

Oh, for sure. I think it's quite interesting that her original patch idea didn't work. That didn't deter her at all. She immediately pivoted into something else. Okay, we've got money, we've got backing, let's pivot bit. Pivot is one of their favorite words in Technology.

[Simon Jack]

By the end of 2005, the company had two dozen employees. They had a prototype, Theranos 1.0, but testing and refining the prototype burnt through that initial $6 million investment. So Elizabeth was working non stop. She was trying to raise more funds and her dad managed to get her a call with Don Lucas, who's a pioneer venture capitalist and a founding investor in Larry Ellison's Oracle.

[Zing Singh]

It's hard to overestimate how big a thing Oracle was, particularly in these years. You know, when I used to go to California to visit friends who worked in this industry, nobody I knew hadn't spent some time at Oracle. Oracle was a kind of feeding ground for all sorts of tech people. Larry Ellison, you know, briefly became the richest man in the world, actually, you know, overtook Musk just for a second. So these are very, very important people. Elizabeth took this call to Don Lucas while she was in China and Lucas was impressed when he heard her speaking Mandarin and arranged to meet her. And these people get phone calls all the time, look for people looking for money. After the meeting, Lucas agreed to invest in Theranos and introduced Elizabeth to Larry Ellison. He also invested in what they call a Series B round. This is the second round of funding that raised $9 million in early 2006. Series C funding a few months later raised over three times that, 28 million. There's a snowball effect when you get names like Lucas and Ellison attached to this company. That same year, 22 year old Elizabeth was profiled in Inc. Magazine alongside other young entrepreneurs, like a young fellow called Mark Zuckerberg, who is exactly the same.

[Simon Jack]

Age, you know, as someone who does speak Mandarin. Mandarin has this very odd effect on people where if they hear you speaking it, they don't have to understand what you're saying, they don't even have to know if you're speaking it. Well, it has this effect of people suddenly going, oh, wow, this person must be smart. Especially if they're not actually of Chinese heritage.

[Zing Singh]

Right.

[Simon Jack]

I think this is what was happening here.

[Zing Singh]

I think it's seen as somebody who far thinking enough into the way the world economy is moving and shaping and heading that they've taken the time to learn what is quite a difficult language. My brother tried to teach me some words. He speaks it a bit. He lives in Beijing now and it's, you know, it's tough.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, you know, you could be ordering a bowl of noodles, it doesn't matter. All you need to do is give a convincing impression that you are just.

[Zing Singh]

Looks across the room and goes, wow.

[Simon Jack]

Well, I actually looked at that pitch document that young Elizabeth was giving out to investors, and it's interesting because it's very snazzy, it's very professional, but it also doesn't offer a lot of information about how the technology works.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, there's a lot of jargon in there, which I don't. I honestly don't understand. But most of it is to do with kind of, you know, sales targets and market penetration and size of market and opportunity, whatever. There's very little of granular medical information in it, and I think that was. It's all about getting the money rather than proving that the actual product works.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And I feel like that should have been a red flag to investors. Maybe at that point, you don't really care. You just want to know you're not missing out.

[Zing Singh]

Well, look at who the people on her board are. They're not medical types. She's not surrounded by clinical expertise here at this stage. This is all still fundraisers of people who think this might be a good idea. And she's got money, but she still needs the deals to bring in the revenue, because this wonderful bit in Silicon Valley when we are pre revenue and pre profit, and so you need deals to start bringing some of that in.

[Simon Jack]

So, in 2006, the team flew to Switzerland to pitch a drug company called Novartis on new using its blood testing tech in clinical drug trials. But the night before the demo, the Theranos prototype kept giving error messages. Uh oh. And unable to fix it, Elizabeth's team faked the result. During the presentation, they used an earlier reading, which was correct, to make it look like the machine was working. And this is really, I think, the sliding doors moment when things start spiraling.

[Zing Singh]

You're not the only person who said, oh. Because Theranos chief financial officer at the time was not comfortable about this fake result. When he raised concerns with Elizabeth about this Switzerland meeting and other possible fake demonstrations for investors, she replied, I don't think you are a team player. I think you should leave right now. So this seems to be, as you say, where the reality of the company's product and the fundraising narrative begin to slightly diverge. To protect this narrative, anyone raising doubts was not welcome.

[Simon Jack]

And also, it's important to say that this actually isn't how a lot of science works. Right. So a lot of science is looking at what came before, innovating on it or criticizing it. Peer review, peer review of studies. You know, this isn't how one should go about creating scientific advances.

[Zing Singh]

Nevertheless, she decides to Put even more pressure on her teams.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So she created a competition. So one group worked to improve the original microfluidics based prototype. Another one developed a new design. The new design won. The head of the original team was fired. So that, I think tells you a lot about her personality and her way of dealing with conflict.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, this thing was called the Edison and it used a mechanical arm to move blood into vials. Less revolutionary than promised, it abandoned the innovative microfluidics vision which was so central to the original plan, it adapted technology that was already around into a slightly smaller form. And even though the product no longer used true microfluidics, Elizabeth continued to claim it was central to Theranos technology when pitching to investors. So basically she's still saying, oh, this is so important, this is at the heart of my innovation. It's actually not really at the heart of the innovation anymore, but let's keep telling them that, that.

[Simon Jack]

So by 2007, Elizabeth was telling her board she had various pharmaceutical deals lined up. But when board member A.V. tavanian, a former Apple exec, close friend to Steve Jobs, asked about the details, Elizabeth just dodged his questions. And when he took his concerns to Don Lucas, who is now chairman of the board, Tavanian was pressurized to resign. So again, a really kind of ruthless approach to dissent.

[Zing Singh]

By 2008, there were other board members raising flags as well. They were concerned about the disparity between the glowing revenue forecast and delays in product development. Elizabeth faced a threat that quite a few of our billionaires actually have faced from time to time, including Elon Musk and ousting by the board. The board questioned whether Elizabeth was too young, too inexperienced. But after a two hour meeting, she brought them back on board, talked them down and managed to stay in charge.

[Simon Jack]

I'm not sure how she managed to pull this off, to be honest. I have to say, looking at interviews of her, there is a kind of odd charisma. And I think that if she kind of turned that attention on you, you kind of feel, well, she's clearly a bit of an odd, but she believes in it.

[Zing Singh]

And also there is this kind of culture in tech, which is that this person might be crazy or they might be a genius and, you know, maybe I'll lose a few million dollars, maybe I'll make billions. If you are committed and strident and enough of a believer, sort of messianic if you like, then there is, there's some room for that, you know, amongst these board and maybe, and that's clearly what she had there's probably a really.

[Simon Jack]

Interesting academic paper to be done into the effect of groupthink in funding rounds.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, but you know, they're spending money. Theron Austin in 2009, she's running out of cash again.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And this time, Elizabeth asked her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, for help. Now, Elizabeth had met Balwani, who was on the same Mandarin course she'd attended in China the summer before she went to Stanford. She was 19, he was 37. He'd sold a software company for $40 million just before the dot com crash. And like many of the funders, he had no biotech. Their relationship was also secret, but he loaned Theranos $10 million and then became its president.

[Zing Singh]

And by this point, Elizabeth was fully channeling her idol, Steve Jobs. She was wearing the famous black turtleneck. She adopted a deeper voice, shades of Margaret Thatcher. There lived on green juices. Jobs preferred orange ones, carrot ones. And she'd also been hiring ex Apple staff, including a designer tasked with making the Edison look as sleek and consumer friendly and as cool as an iPhone. When Steve jobs died in 2011, she got a Theranos employee to order a custom made Apple flag and had it flown at half mast at Theranos hq, out of respect and in his honour.

[Simon Jack]

Now, Elizabeth styled herself as a revolutionary. She was channeling Jobs with these big world changing promises. When she took the staff on a Christmas outing, she told them that the prototype they were working on was the most important thing humanity ever built. Everyone needs to work as hard as humanly possible to deliver it. And despite their growing doubts, the vision kept staff on board. And as an eventual whistleblower, could Tyler Schultz put it in Alex Gibney's documentary the Inventor? I would leave the lab thinking, oh, man, sinking ship. And I would go have one conversation with Elizabeth and I felt like I was changing the world again.

[Zing Singh]

Amazing. Just that kind of talismanic quality to be able to convince people. And while she was keeping converts on side, Sonny would play the bad cop in this relationship. He was known for fostering culture fear. At Theranos, the firings were so off, frequent employees darkly joked that Sonny disappeared them like some sort of mafia boss. He also monitored staff, judged commitment by how long people stayed at their desks. All the things we're told we're not supposed to do.

[Simon Jack]

I mean, all in all, Theranos sounds like a delightful place to work. So in 2010, Elizabeth pitched Theranos blood testing tech to a US pharmacy retail chain called Walgreens. Walgreens is massive. You'll have Walgreens in every single city.

[Zing Singh]

The boots of America.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly. So to secure the deal, she gave the executives there this glowing report of Theranos technology bearing the Pfizer logo. The big pharma company that basically falsely implied that Pfizer had authored the report. And in reality, Theranos had only conducted an internal study using their machines in 2007 involving cancer patients, which was then submitted to Pfizer for review. But the Pfizer scientists had actually found that data unconvincing and concluded the technology lacked sufficient scientific support. So as a result, Pfizer ended its relationship with Theranos in 2008. Did she mention any of this while speaking to Walgreens? Absolutely not.

[Zing Singh]

Two uncomfortable dynamics at play here. One is that Pfizer scientists are saying, we don't think this data is very convincing, and removing their name from their research. Just as she's reaching out to the consumer medical marketplace with Walgreens. And in 2010, Walgreens agreed to a preliminary deal to pre purchase up to $50 million worth of cartridges and loan the company a further 25 million. This was before they'd seen Theranos lab or a working demo. And in fact, the Walgreen executives had tried to visit the lab, but were given excuses and ushered into a boardroom. And when they asked even to use the toilet, they were escorted by Theranos staff, so they couldn't even have a peek into the labs.

[Simon Jack]

Now, this secrecy might seem extreme, and also an extreme red flag, but Theranos often emphasized the importance of keeping in stealth mode to protect the proprietary information. And stealth mode is an actual term used in tech. Right. It's when a startup deliberately stays out of the public. It keeps things, you know, secret so it can focus on research and development without outsiders interfering or spying on them. And a lot of Silicon Valley startups actually begin in so called stealth mode. So there's a 2019 study that found that over half of 18 tech unicorns, which are the ones valued over 1 billion, had no highly cited research papers. But the author of the study and medicine professor John Iommed, points out that health startups need to be peer reviewed. In, you know, in his words, this is not a laptop or mobile phone. This is life and death.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah. Now, there's perfectly good reasons you might want to be in stealth mode. If you've invented something which you don't want anyone else to look at and try and beat you to the punch, then you'll keep it under wraps. But crucially, there's another feature of stealth mode. It creates a sense of secrecy and buzz. I can get into the next big thing and no one knows about it. You know, when you've got a kind of, if you like, cultish culture, for want of a better word at a company, stealth mode fits into that kind of world. And it also gives you an excuse to make all your employees sign non disclosure agreements.

[Simon Jack]

And you can imagine it, right? I can imagine a Walgreens executive kind of being ushered past the closed doors of the lab, wanting to take a peek, and someone saying, oh, no, we can't do that. We've got so many competitors. You know, the tech is super top secret. The R and D is completely next level. We can't just let anyone see it. And rather than thinking to yourself, okay, well, something seems a bit off, you just think, oh, wow, it must be really good.

[Zing Singh]

Then Walgreens, who did have doubts about Theranos, especially after Elizabeth refused to allow comparison study of its blood testing technology. But fears of losing to the rival company cvs, another big brand of pharmacies in the US Pushed the deal forward. Theranos was also in talks with Safeway. Safeway Department store were hoping to revitalize its brand and loan the company $30 million and committed to renovating stores for actually in store blood testing clinics.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, so Walgreens executives were reassured when Theranos said Safeway had agreed to host blood drawing sites. So they thought, hey, if Safeway trusts there or not, we can trust Theranos. So you can absolutely see the kind of groupthink emerging here. But what neither Safeway nor Walgreens knew was that the technology just wasn't ready. Theranos machines often failed or they simply weren't finished. So they secretly were using third party lab machines to produce all their results. Elizabeth and Balwani claimed they performed 90% of the most commonly used blood tests, when in reality, their machines could only perform a dozen tests.

[Zing Singh]

Now, who knows, maybe if they'd spent longer on this and maybe if they peer reviewed it and da, da, da, it might have worked, clearly wasn't at the stage of development that was necessary for it to be rolling out to mainstream America.

[Simon Jack]

It's interesting, right, because I think, you know, anybody who's worked in tech and has rolled out a product that, you know, maybe wasn't quite ready to launch, an app that maybe is a little bit glitchy, doesn't have a great user experience, they can think to themselves, well, we can just fix those bugs in the next update.

[Zing Singh]

Exactly.

[Simon Jack]

But this isn't an app.

[Zing Singh]

And it was while working towards this Walgreens launch that Theranos. The chief scientist, Ian Gibbons, repeatedly raised concerns about the accuracy of the technology. His warnings were ignored when he was called to testify against Theranos in a patent suit they were facing. He didn't want to discuss under oath that he knew the technology wasn't working. And two days before he was due to testify, in May 2013, he died from liver failure, having attempted to take his own life. Yeah. And in 2022, his widow told CBS News that she believes the pressure at Theranos contributed to his death and said Elizabeth has showed no remorse. Elizabeth has not publicly commented on Gibbon's death.

[Simon Jack]

But despite all of this happening behind the scenes, in September 2013, the first Theranos Wellness center opened inside a Walgreens in Palo Alto. That's very near Stanford, very near Silicon Valley. Theranos claimed at the time that they could take a small amount of blood from a fingerprint, which could then be used for over 200 tests from cholesterol to cancer. And people in the U.S. at the time could pay $50 for tests for cholesterol. Theranos were charging $2.99.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah. That's a sort of revolutionary price point, isn't it, for. For healthcare.

[Simon Jack]

By 2013, Theranos had assembled one of the most impressive boards in Silicon Valley. Former U.S. secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and top lawyer David Boyes.

[Zing Singh]

That is quite the list. It's interesting, her George Schultz encounter because she'd asked for a ten minute meeting turned into two hours.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, exactly. He was so impressed, the board, and he was the one who actually encouraged the other people to follow. So, you know, government heavyweights, but not biotech experts.

[Zing Singh]

But they're serious people with enormous clout.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah.

[Zing Singh]

So if you're an investor and you say, who's on your board? Henry Kissinger. What? You know.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, that's true.

[Zing Singh]

And with that kind of prestige, that kind of name recognition, investors were only too happy to shell out more money. For example, Theranos was saying it would earn $165 million in profit on 261 million in revenue. That's a high profit margin. Those numbers were fiction. Theranos actually made just over 100,000 in revenue in 2014, other than 261 million. But didn't stop Theranos raising the money. They'd raised nearly 200 million from investors in total by early 2014.

[Simon Jack]

And in that same year, Elizabeth Holmes fully embraced the Billionaire lifestyle. She flew to meetings on private jets. She was regularly accompanied by bodyguards who nicknamed her Eagle 1 and Sunny Balwani as Eagle 2. She was eating at luxury restaurants. She was buying designer clothes and jewelry. She was charging or to the company saying that it was important for Theranos. Image Theranos Palo Alto HQ cost a million dollars a month in rent, and Elizabeth reportedly spent $100,000 on a single conference table. All part of this carefully curated image of the visionary CEO.

[Zing Singh]

Given the fact that she knows, or maybe she's blocked out, the fact that lots of people, her chief scientist has been warning, you know, her CFO left, you know, red flags everywhere, and at the same time, you're behaving on private jets as Eagle 1 and all this kind of stuff, it slips from kind of like confidence into almost delusion. You know what I mean? There's something a little bit not right here.

[Simon Jack]

I think this story is an interesting one because you have to wonder, did she realize that the tech was just not working and maybe would never work, and she was just deluding herself into believing that at some point someone's gonna make a breakthrough, so I need to do what I'm good at doing, which is getting money out of people, people? Or did she know all along the tech would never work and therefore she was just a grifter who was scamming people?

[Zing Singh]

Yeah. Meanwhile, in June 2014, Fortune magazine had Elizabeth on the COVID and stated that Theranos now had a valuation of $9 billion. In the article, Elizabeth said, it's kind of like proper text speak. This, this is about being able to do good consumerizing. This healthcare experience is a huge element of our mission. But at the same time, Theranos lab director Adam Rosenoff was telling Elizabeth that some of the tests had unreliable results. He later said she seemed pretty calm about the whole thing. She didn't seem to share my level of alarm. He then quit a few months later.

[Simon Jack]

By October, Forbes calculated Elizabeth's wealth to be $4.5 billion, based on her 50% stake in Theranos. She was ranked 110 on their rich list and was, at 30 years old, the young, youngest self made female billionaire in America. In a speech she made after becoming a billionaire, she said, I would say that I am living proof that it's true. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.

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[Zing Singh]

In 2014, she's a billionaire. Let us take her beyond that and bring it up to date. By 2015, Holmes had raised over $400 million from investors. Her back has now included the Walton family, who owned that small little family store called Walmart, and Rupert Murdoch. You may have heard of big names, deep pockets. They'd all been told about the company by their lawyer. Lawyer who also happened to be Henry Kissinger's lawyer. And it is interesting. Lawyers can sometimes be the grapevine in these circles.

[Simon Jack]

Interesting. So in early 2015, the Wall Street Journal reporter John Cariou got a tip. Theranos wasn't what it seemed. His investigation soon uncovered that the company's technology couldn't reliably perform the full range of tests from just a few drops of blood. And as Cariou dug deeper, Theranos attempted to silence his sources through legal threats and NDAs. Elizabeth even tried to persuade Rupert Murdoch, who was a major investor, to kill the story in a September 2015 meeting. She urged him to intervene, but he refused.

[Zing Singh]

And in October 2015, Wall Street Journal splashed on it. They published an expose revealing that Theranos was using third party machines, raising doubts about the accuracy of blood testing technology. Theranos denied the claims, calling the report factually and scientifically erroneous, blaming former disgruntled employees. That same day, holmes went on CNBC's Mad Money. And CNBC is the kind of thing that gets shown on trading floor and whatever, all around the world. It's a kind of financial channel, defending thoroughness with very calm conviction on live tv, she said. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.

[Simon Jack]

But despite all this bravado, things were not going according to plan. A day after the article was published, Theranos halted use of their nanotainer, the small vial that they were using to collect the fingerprint blood in for all but one test. And that was under pressure from the fda.

[Zing Singh]

Food and Drug Addiction Administration.

[Simon Jack]

Yes. So a few weeks later, the FDA then released two reports citing 14 concerns and called the nanotainer an uncleared medical device. And by January 2016, a US government health agency found such serious issues in the company's lab that it declared Theranos posed an immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.

[Zing Singh]

That sounds like a death knell to A medical company.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. That is a bombshell and a half.

[Zing Singh]

So Walgreens had to act. They suspended Theranos service at its Palo Alto location. They stopped sending lab tests to the company's California lab. They sent it to third party labs instead. A few months later, they ended their partnership, closed the 40 Theranos Wellness Centers and Safeway, if you remember that deal, the supermarket there. They ended up paying $350 million to Theranos. But after years of delays, they never even had a rollout of the blood testing services. They didn't even start there. The clinics they built at over 800 stalls were instead used for flu shots and travel vaccines.

[Simon Jack]

In June 2016, Forbes changed its estimate of Elizabeth Holmes NET worth from 4 and a half billion to 0 OUC and Theranos market value went from 9 billion to 800 million. And as Theranos collapsed dramatically, Holmes flew across the country to buy a Siberian husky named Balto, hoping that it would help to symbolically reboot the company's future. Not sure how a Siberian husky would do that.

[Zing Singh]

That's the craziest idea I've ever heard.

[Simon Jack]

I mean, the dog became a fixture at Theranos HQ despite not being toilet trained. Balto also had a habit of relieving himself during company meetings.

[Zing Singh]

I think that's much more of a symbol, reflection of the company's future. A bit of dog mess on the floor.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Imagine being an employee being told that Theranos is on its way back up. Oh, yes, and Balto is in the corner there, relieving himself.

[Zing Singh]

On 14 June 2018, Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani were charged with multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy for misleading investors and patients about Theranos blood testing technology. A day later, Elizabeth stepped down as CEO and did not speak publicly. Holmes was tried first and in January 2022 was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors. She was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison and ordered to pay part of a 452 million dollar restitution or compensation. Balwani was tried separately and received an even longer sentence of nearly 13 years.

[Simon Jack]

Holmes began her prison sentence in May 2023. She was interviewed by People magazine in February 2025, which said that she works out daily, she eats vegan meals and teaches French to mates. She also maintains her innocence in that interview. And in 2025, despite appeals, both Elizabeth and Sunny's convictions were upheld along with the full restitution order.

[Zing Singh]

They were both acquitted of charges relating to defrauding patients between 2013 and 2016, Theranos ran over one and a half million tests for 176,000 patients. More than 10% of those results avoided or corrected due to errors. Some patients even receive false positives for serious conditions like cancer and autoimmune diseases, leading to unnecessary treatments and, of course, emotional distress. In 2023, Walgreens agreed to a $44 million settlement with the patients who received Theranos blood tests on their premises. Each patient got a $10 base payment. That's double the cost of the test and up to $1,000 if they'd undergone fingerprick testing.

[Simon Jack]

Now, what happened to those investors? Rupert Murdoch sold his stock back to Theranos for a dollar to claim a earnings. He lost 121 million, but got 4 million back under legal settlement. But not all the investors who lost their money were wealthy enough to pay for their lawsuits.

[Zing Singh]

ABC's the Dropout podcast featured a woman who lost her life savings $150,000 Investing in Theranos through her financial advisor. And a man who lost $1.2 million, advised again by a financial advisor, testified at Elizabeth's trial.

[Simon Jack]

During the trial itself, it was revealed that Elizabeth Holmes received an annual salary of around $200,000 while at the but she also owes over 25 million to the company, taken out in three promissory.

[Zing Singh]

Notes, basically an IOU from the company. Give me some petty cash out of the till to pay for my private jets, private jets and my nice tables, and I promise I'll pay you back out of my vast fortune when Theranos is well beaten company.

[Simon Jack]

Well, guess what? None of those promissory notes have been repaid. Holmes is also now in a relationship with a hotel heir called Billy Evans. And they have two children. A son born in 2021, and a daughter born just months before Holmes entered PR prison.

[Zing Singh]

Anyway, it's time for us to judge Elizabeth Holmes, or for you to judge Elizabeth Holmes. We score our billionaires in a few different categories. Wealth, controversy, philanthropy, the legacy they've left behind from 1 to 10. And we always start with wealth. I mean, came from once rich family, very well connected, had tales of greatness in the family's past. So quite a fertile ground for people to believe that you could go and achieve something. This wasn't someone telling you you could. You can't do stuff.

[Simon Jack]

And at the height of that wealth, she was worth what? Four and a half billion spending wise? You know, she was flying private jets, she was having a luxurious lifestyle all in the company dime, apparently. She paid $9 million for a five bed mansion in Silicon Valley. So you know, she was living the life of a billionaire. But it has to be said that, you know, she's now been reduced to earning 31 cents an hour as a re entry clerk in prison.

[Zing Singh]

Gosh, she's making me feel well off. And also one of the most spectacular and rapid falls from wealth we've seen. Four and a half billion in 2015, zero in 2016. I think only Sam Bankman Fried can rival that in terms of a fall from financial grace.

[Simon Jack]

And of course he's also still in prison too.

[Zing Singh]

He's still in prison? Yes. On wealth. You know, she was at one point the youngest self made female billionaire in the us in the world.

[Simon Jack]

In the world, yeah.

[Zing Singh]

So at her height, you know, she was flying pretty high and then what a spectacular flight.

[Simon Jack]

Have you heard of this phrase girl bossing too close to the sun? No, it's very good. It's basically applies to female girl bosses, you know, that kind of Elizabeth Holmes type. Female figures who kind of put themselves out there as these innovative charismatic messiahs who will change the world who also happen to be women. So it's a feminist win. Okay. And they simply go, boss too close to the sun.

[Zing Singh]

Really.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Well this is definitely an example of that.

[Zing Singh]

Got it. I just think the wealth is kind of interesting. So I'm going to give her a. Even though it's not that much money in, in sort of big leagues, it's quite an interesting trajectory. So I'm going to give her a six.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I think she's a six out of 10 for me from wealth. Even though she is technically, I suppose worth nothing right now.

[Zing Singh]

Okay, let us move on to controversy. Well, where do we start?

[Simon Jack]

I mean the whole story is one of controversy.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Simon Jack]

With a capital C. Defrauding investors, you know, lying to their faces, even fabricating reports that the technology was working.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah. And convince some of the, the, you know, wisest people in America. You know, people like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, you've got Larry Ellison involved, Don Lucas. These people are heavyweights.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And if you look at pictures of Elizabeth from the time that she was riding high, it is quite a sight. It's this very young looking blonde woman. She's got these enormous, kind of quite glassy eyes, black turtleneck, and she's surrounded by these much older men who have, you know, been in politics, been in, you know, the finance world, been in tech for decades longer than she has. And she's sort of there staring at all of them like Give me the money.

[Zing Singh]

I think we should also have a very important shout out to Ian Gibbons, who was the chief scientist at Theranos, who tried to take his own life and died of liver failure. He had had grave concern, and his wife was clear that something about the company Theranos contributed to his death. So I think you've got to give this controversy. I'm giving it a 10.

[Simon Jack]

I think it's a 10 out of 10 for me.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah. Okay.

[Simon Jack]

I don't think you can come up with a greater cautionary tale in tech.

[Zing Singh]

No philanthropy. As usual, there doesn't seem to be a lot of public information about her philanthropy. And it seems on this occasion it's not just because there's lack of information, because she didn't want it to be known what great things she was doing. It seems more likely that there wasn't any.

[Simon Jack]

Now, interestingly, there is a company called Wealthx which helps charities check if their donations are from legit companies. Before the Theranos scandal broke in the news, there were apparently some clients at Wealthex who wanted to add Elizabet Elizabeth Holmes to their charity boards. But reportedly this wealth Ex company were advising people from adding her because they were actually quite wary of Theranos claims.

[Zing Singh]

Wow. So what does that mean, a zero for philanthropy?

[Simon Jack]

It's a zero for me. I think, in fact, they're probably anti philanthropic.

[Zing Singh]

It's a. This is a. This is a judging. Judging round of extremes from 10 to zero. Power and legacy. It's a hell of a tale, this one, isn't it? So I think that the legacy is all in the kind of folk tale that she's drawn in during this, apparently.

[Simon Jack]

And maybe if you are at business school listening to us right now, I know there are some people who do drop out.

[Zing Singh]

Now you'll become a billionaire. Just kidding.

[Simon Jack]

Learn Mandarin. Maybe that's a better. That's a better learning. From this episode. Apparently this tale is being taught to business school students as a kind of cautionary tale of startup culture is absolute worst.

[Zing Singh]

Yeah, but in some ways it. You can. You could. You could say it's a cautionary tale because she was dabbling in medical technology and therefore the stakes incredibly, incredibly high, and something was bound to go wrong. If this had been a, you know, phone that wasn't very good or a service that didn't quite work or a VR headset. Yeah, right, exactly. Then. Then she'd probably be, you know, lionized as a. As a hero, and she'll probably be starting another company as we speak right now. And you know, the fake it till you make it story is not just a cautionary tale. It's kind of a guidebook in some ways. Right. In some cases, it's, you know, that's the way you do business. And if actually failing a couple of times is seen as a badge of honor in tech world, I wonder if.

[Simon Jack]

This is just an example of a fatal mismatch. Like if Elizabeth Holmes wasn't interested in biotech and she was interested in, say.

[Zing Singh]

You know, dating apps or.

[Simon Jack]

Dating apps or HR organizational software.

[Zing Singh]

Exactly.

[Simon Jack]

You know, would this fake it as you make it attitude had. Would it have such serious consequences? I don't think so.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

No.

[Zing Singh]

Exactly.

[Simon Jack]

I mean, it was basically the fatal flaw in that was that she went after an industry where you basically need to be quite transparent with your technology, with your scientific advances, because that helps you be better.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah, yeah.

[Zing Singh]

When the FDA come in to shut you down, essentially, then, you know, you're in a different. A different kind of business. What about, you know, I'm just trying to think if she's helpful or not helpful to female founders. You know, people say, oh, boy, here's another Elizabeth Holmes on her hands.

[Simon Jack]

There have actually been some female founders who say that it's actually. It's actually been bad for them, because now people scrutinize female founders more closely because they're worried that they're just another Elizabeth Holmes.

[Zing Singh]

That's spectacularly unfair, isn't it? It really is. I'm gonna give her a seven for legacy. They'll be talking about this tale for.

[Simon Jack]

A long time, I think. So. I think actually I would give her. Obviously she's not very powerful now, but in terms of legacy, I think she's up there with some of the. The biggest kind of scandals and scams of the 21st century. So I'm gonna give her an eight.

[Zing Singh]

Okay, fair enough. Final reflection. It's one of those stories that doesn't come along very often, isn't it? The thing about this podcast series is that we've seen quite a lot of fortunes made quickly and then lost quickly. And the kind of money that people have made is something that we've never seen in any period in history ever before. Sam Bankman Fried, for example, went from 0 to 18 billion and then down to 0 again. She went from next to nothing to 4 and a half billion, then down to zero again. I think this story will stay with me and with the canon of financial history for a long time.

[Simon Jack]

And yet, at the same time, even though we're at a period where People are making and losing more money than ever before in human history. It seems like human impulses and human thinking is still very much the same as it's always been. You know, the effect of group think, of herd thinking, the fear of missing out, the ability of people to create themselves as kind of messianic figures to create cults of personality that encourage people to see past big red flags. You know, these are all things that have been happening for centuries. It's just that the money involved is so much greater now.

[Zing Singh]

And it's interesting, I was more moved by the woman who'd lost $150,000 in her life savings and the guy lost 1.2 million, most of his net worth than I am about the Rupert Maddox who's 121 million of theirs. I mean, they are used to the fact that they've got many multi billions. They put a 20 million into something, put 100 million in there. One of these things will hit the COVID off the ball and be worth a trillion and the other one will crash and burn and they don't care. Do you mean that's the risk they take? They're grown up, they've got their eyes wide open. It's different when it's medical technology, I think, like we were saying, when it's a car or a smartphone. But it's those people, I think that, you know, who got swindled into, you know, believing in this, who lost big parts of their personal net worth for everyone else, it's part of the game.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I mean, it is a real. It is a fascinating story. And I think I keep coming back to that question of did Elizabeth Holmes know that the tech didn't work and she either deluded herself into believing it would be fine, or did she just simply not care and she was just scamming her way to the top? I don't know. You know, I still don't know, maybe even after this episode. What do you think?

[Zing Singh]

I'm not so sure, but I think it gets right to the heart of whether she's good, bad or just another billionaire. What do you think? Please do email goodbadbillionairebc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176. Tell us what you think and also.

[Simon Jack]

Don'T forget to include your name. We may read out your message on a future episode.

[Zing Singh]

And a final thanks to John Kerryrou, whose excellent book Bad Blood was one of many sources for this, but was an absolute belter of a book.

[Simon Jack]

Well, we've got some listener feedback. Ephraim, who is 13 from Ghana, got in touch to give feedback on our David Geffen and Sarah Blakely episodes. They said on David Geffen. I think David Geffen is just another billionaire. He helped pull up other people and also ditched others. So he's just in between.

[Zing Singh]

And Ephraim says of Sarah Blakely, I see fashion as waste. But for someone like Sarah Blakely who's changed how women are viewed in fashion, she's surely a good billionaire.

[Simon Jack]

And Scott got in touch from Ontario, Canada. Scott's email and the subject line almonds, full stop.

[Zing Singh]

Okay.

[Simon Jack]

Scott says love the show for the insight and fun banter including January 23's show, you peel your almonds. If you remember this, a listener sent in feedback about our Elon Musk episode saying she was listening to it while peeling her almonds.

[Zing Singh]

Yes. Which I was surprised that that was a thing.

[Simon Jack]

Well, Scott on his part says he laughed out loud and goes on to say yes, peeling the almonds makes them creamier in recipes like almond milk and the skins can be ground and used as roughage in face scru. Now have to get back to rolling my pennies billionaire knots.

[Zing Singh]

Thanks very much for getting in touch.

[Simon Jack]

Scott, and letting us know how to make good almond milk.

[Zing Singh]

So who have we got next?

[Simon Jack]

Well, we've got a billionaire who is visionary to some, ruthless to others, in the words of one listener who recommended we cover him.

[Zing Singh]

He is database mogul, the owner of his own Hawaiian island and likes to fly fighter jets.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, well, he certainly fits the billionaire playboy mold. It's none other than Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Tamsen Curry. The researcher is Maria Noyen, the editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios production for the BBC World Service. The senior commissioning producer is Sarah Green and the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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