Elizabeth Holmes is the former CEO of a company called Theranos (collectors, get your swag now). Their stated mission was to be able to perform a couple-hundred or more tests from a single drop of blood, rather than multiple vials, which would be needed to perform all those tests by existing methods.
I have to give myself credit here...or actually my Bullshitometer, because I remember when this started, and when I heard that they supposedly were able to get that many tests out of just a single drop of blood, I called bullshit immediately.
I'm not a doctor so what do I know, but to dilute a single drop of blood down to a few PPM or whatever, just to get enough material for 200 tests didn't ring true to me. I'm not saying that that technology doesn't exist, and in fact I think it probably does, but to fit all that kit into a portable unit about the size of a large suitcase, and ship those units to pharmacies all over the world, and have people be able to walk in, get a pin prick and give one drop of blood and get your results via email the next day, sort of like going through the drive-through at McDonalds...it sounded like a pipe dream, and I wanted some of what she was smoking.
The reason it sounded like bullshit is because it was...every bit of it. She literally bullshitted her way into becoming the CEO of a company worth $9-billion or so. She had no background in medicine or biochemistry or whatever...what she had was a big fear of needles, which supposedly is the reason she started the company.
Although she (and all narcissists) knows right from wrong, and knew she was bullshitting people from day 1, I don't think it was a case of her trying to straight-up bullshit people out of their money...I really think she thought she could magically pull it off simply because as a narcissist, with all the grandiosity, superiority, lack of empathy and all, she thought she could do anything just because of who she was.
It's not my diagnosis (and I'm not qualified to diagnose anything) that she's a narcissist, but as one of the members of the Behavior Panel on YouTube, I think Chase Hughes, said (to paraphrase): "You may not be a Psychologist, but if you can't spot a narcissist, you're a dumbass. I'm not a Botanist, but I know what Poison Ivy is." Thank you, Chase.
If you go to any article or video about narcissism on planet Earth, you'll get a list of the exact same symptoms. The only difference is the severity to which they take these traits. It's one of the many, many things that makes narcissism so creepy, and I say demonic. If you jot down or print out a list, and go watch an Elizabeth Holmes or an Amber Heard video, you can tick all the boxes. A narcissist from the Sticks of Alabama will behave exactly the same as one in upstate New York, or Copenhagen or Prague or the UK or anywhere else on Earth. It's like there's a Narcissist's Handbook they follow. You can set your watch to it.
Here's where being a narcissist pays off...in their ability to charm people into (temporarily) believing their bullshit, is off the charts. They learn this behavior early in life, and before they even realize that they're learning. Since they have no empathy and have no feelings or regard for others and are empty inside, they learn to mimic people, copying the behaviors that get positive results. It's not genuine but it's incredibly convincing.
Amazingly she bullshitted a few of the wealthiest families on Earth to invest, including the Waltons, the Royal Fam of Saudi Arabia, Hank Kissinger and other luminaries, and it snowballed from there. She then used their names as street cred for her bullshit, to get even more investors to get onboard. She handled her company the way all narcissistic bosses do.
Long story short it wasn't a fun environment. If you want to look into it, I'd suggest the Behavior Panel. Their main things are body language and behavior, but the reason I watch them, besides the fact that they're very intelligent and quite entertaining too, is because they have a real understanding of narcissism.
An interesting but savage thing is that since she isn't wired for empathy or love and has no regard whatsoever for others, she never gave a thought to the people that could potentially be harmed by a misdiagnosis, and I think that the machines that did work without immediately breaking down, as many did, gave false readings 40% or more of the time. That's unacceptable.
When this subject was mentioned, she just got an even blanker look on her face and a bigger creepy smile, that indicated clearly that if she'd even given it a passing thought it didn't matter. I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure that it got to the human trials stage, and some people were misdiagnosed. Even if not, she was playing around with people's health and even their very lives, with absolutely no concern to her.
When the interview with the guy she was bullshitting took place, she wasn't yet in trouble. At the time of the interview the machine would only properly perform a single test, which I think was Syphilis. 9-bil to be able to do a test that the corner drugstore could do. When questioned on that she became visibly irritated, as if how dare he question her on that, and said something like "Well, if YOU want to zero-in on that fact..." The guy interrupted her and said that it was HER words that it would perform hundreds of tests, and that was the whole premise of the company.
She just deflected and started talking about other things like her "Nanotainers" and shit. She sidestepped the question, but that's how narcissists roll. She made it seem like he was the problem, for asking why her machines could only perform a single test, rather than the fact that her machines could only perform a single test. In her mind it somehow made sense. Narcissists' brains are totally flip-flopped.
If you want to see someone straight-up bullshitting someone through the biggest smile you've ever seen, go watch a vid on Elizabeth Holmes. She's totally bullshitting the interviewer, and she knows it and he knows it. It's pretty amazing to see. The entire time she's bobbing her head, subconsciously trying to get the guy to agree with all of her bullshit.
The head-bobbing is so severe that you may have to pause the videos every once in a while to keep from getting seasick, and that's no joke. If you speed it up it looks like a life-size Elizabeth Holmes bobblehead doll on the hood of a car in a dirt track race. It's remarkable, and well worth watching. People should know about narcissists, because they're the fuckers calling the shots. Bullshit is their game.
Sadly for Elizabeth Holmes and all other narcissists, in the end a foundation built of bullshit will start to reek, and reveal itself to be bullshit. I think she's serving time right now. If she's following the Narcissist's Handbook, and I reckon she is, then right now, like all inmates she's pondering, except that it's not a matter of where she went wrong...it's everybody else. She's the victim here, and the simpletons of Planet Earth just couldn't understand her genius. If she'd only had more time she couldda pulled it off, because she can do anything. In clinical terms that's called "magical thinking." It's so true.
She built a $9-billion company on nothing more than bullshit. That's some serious bullshit right there, and I think it at least gets Bullshit of the Decade honors. Then again, bullshit does run in her family. Her dad was CEO of Enron. Go figure. Alice Cooper had Billion Dollar Babies. Elizabeth Holmes had Billion Dollar Bullshit. Impressive, Captain.
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