Robertson, the Stanford engineering professor whose reputation
helped give her credibility when she was just a teenager. Then there
was Donald L. Lucas, the aging venture capitalist whose backing and
connections enabled her to keep raising money. Dr. J and Wade
Miquelon at Walgreens and Safeway CEO Steve Burd were next,
followed by James Mattis, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger
(Mattis’s entanglement with Theranos proved no obstacle to his being
confirmed as President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense). David
Boies and Rupert Murdoch complete the list, though I’ve left out many
others who were bewitched by Holmes’s mixture of charm,
intelligence, and charisma.
A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no
conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes
fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass
was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to
defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped
out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that
she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her
all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the
gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped
listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was
voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral
damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.