After he wrapped up, the leaders of Theranos stood before their employees and surveyed the room. Then a chant erupted. “Fuck you . . .,” employees began yelling in unison, “Carreyrou.” It began to grow louder still. “Fuck you, Carreyrou!” Soon men and women in lab coats, and programmers in T-shirts and jeans, joined in. They were chanting with fervor: “Fuck you, Carreyrou!,” they cried out. “Fuck you, Carreyrou! Fuck. You. Carrey-rou!”

The Game

In Silicon Valley, every company has an origin story—a fable, often slightly embellished, that humanizes its mission for the purpose of winning over investors, the press, and, if it ever gets to that point, customers, too. These origin stories can provide a unique, and uniquely powerful, lubricant in the Valley. After all, while Silicon Valley is responsible for some truly astounding companies, its business dealings can also replicate one big confidence game in which entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the tech media pretend to vet one another while, in reality, functioning as cogs in a machine that is designed to not question anything—and buoy one another all along the way.

It generally works like this: the venture capitalists (who are mostly white men) don’t really know what they’re doing with any certainty—it’s impossible, after all, to truly predict the next big thing—so they bet a little bit on every company that they can with the hope that one of them hits it big. The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say “Yo!” (and only “Yo!”) to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists, because they can also pretend they’re not there only to make money. And this also helps seduce the tech press (also largely comprised of white men), which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to customers more expeditiously. The financial rewards speak for themselves. Silicon Valley, which is 50 square miles, has created more wealth than any place in human history. In the end, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to call bullshit.

“I DON’T THINK YOUR IDEA IS GOING TO WORK,” ONE PROFESSOR RECALLS TELLING HOLMES.

When Elizabeth Holmes emerged on the tech scene, around 2003, she had a preternaturally good story. She was a woman. She was building a company that really aimed to change the world. And, as a then dark-haired 19-year-old first-year at Stanford University’s School of Chemical Engineering, she already comported herself in a distinctly Jobsian fashion. She adopted black turtlenecks, would boast of never taking a vacation, and would come to practice veganism. She quoted Jane Austen by heart and referred to a letter that she had written to her father when she was nine years old insisting, “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” And it was this instinct, she said, coupled with a childhood fear of needles, that led her to come up with her revolutionary company.

Holmes had indeed mastered the Silicon Valley game. Revered venture capitalists, such as Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson, invested in her; Marc Andreessen called her the next Steve Jobs. She was plastered on the covers of magazines, featured on TV shows, and offered keynote-speaker slots at tech conferences. (Holmes spoke at *Vanity Fair’*s 2015 New Establishment Summit less than two weeks before Carreyrou’s first story appeared in the Journal.) In some ways, the near-universal adoration of Holmes reflected her extraordinary comportment. In others, however, it reflected the Valley’s own narcissism. Finally, it seemed, there was a female innovator who was indeed able to personify the Valley’s vision of itself—someone who was endeavoring to make the world a better place.

The original Theranos laboratory, in Palo Alto, 2014. By Drew Kelly.

Holmes’s real story, however, was a little more complicated. When she first came up with the precursor to the idea of Theranos, which eventually aimed to reap vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger, she approached several of her professors at Stanford, according to someone who knew Holmes back then. But most explained to the chemical-engineering major that it was virtually impossible to do so with any real efficacy. “I told her, I don’t think your idea is going to work,” Phyllis Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, said to me, about Holmes’s seminal pitch for Theranos. As Gardner explained, it is impossible to get a precise result from the tip of a finger for most of the tests that Theranos would claim to conduct accurately. When a finger is pricked, the probe breaks up cells, allowing debris, among other things, to escape into the interstitial fluid. While it is feasible to test for pathogens this way, a pinprick is too unreliable for obtaining more nuanced readings. Furthermore, there isn’t that much reliable data that you can reap from such a small amount of blood. But Holmes was nothing if not determined. Rather than drop her idea, she tried to persuade Channing Robertson, her adviser at Stanford, to back her in her quest. He did. (“It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”)