Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. The article—“A Drop of Blood, an Instant Diagnosis”—wasn’t a science story, or even a business story. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal’s editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act.
He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories—the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter. I was an editor at WIRED back then, and Theranos-as-presented felt very WIRED. It looked like evidence that a Silicon Valley approach to innovation would work in every industry, including medicine. And at the magazine that first published the idea of the “quantified self,” Theranos’ pitch validated the notion that individuals could take charge of their own health with innovative tech and access to data.
One of my colleagues, an editor named Caitlin Roper, saw a story in Theranos and in Holmes, but no one was sure what shape it should take. The executive editor suggested Roper just go talk to Holmes and see what was what. The result was an influential long-form Q&A headlined “One Drop, Infinite Data: How Elizabeth Holmes Built a Better Blood Test.” Because print magazines move with the agility and speed of a post-Panamax cargo ship, the story didn’t run until the March 2014 issue.
Over the next few months, other publications followed. Fortune put Holmes on the cover. The New Yorker did a profile. In October 2015, Inc. put her on the cover, calling her “the next Steve Jobs”—and a couple of weeks later, The Wall Street Journal did another article on Theranos, by the reporter John Carreyrou. The headline was deceptively humble: “Theranos Has Struggled with Blood Tests.”
Uh-oh.
The speedy and accurate blood tests were fake, the innovative tech didn’t exist, and Walgreens, a major partner, terminated its deal with Theranos. It was a grift. A new documentary film, out this week, follows Holmes in the weeks leading up to her incarceration.
Get a bunch of old WIRED editors together these days and it doesn’t take more than one drink before we start asking each other whether we enabled the worst parts of the tech world’s rise to power. Sometimes it seems like every antichrist-lecturing, panopticon-building, machine-god-bothering weirdo with $100 billion and a government contract made his debut in our pages. So, with Theranos and Holmes back in the news, the current administration at WIRED wondered what we were thinking back then.
It was a long time ago. I called Caitlin.
As always, we were looking for good stories. “I was interested in this female founder, but also the idea that her actual goal was disruption of health care, that there could be more transparency and reduced costs,” says Roper, who today is executive producer for scripted film and TV at The New York Times. “I was going through some medical stuff at the time and having constant blood tests, and I was curious about what this could do.”
Roper got a go-ahead to report and write something, execution to be determined. In the house jargon: Green light, format TK. She and I talked it through separately. “The conversation I remember with you, which I thought of many years later, was looking at the board of directors, her board, which was just completely batshit. It had military figures and government officials, and just seemed very odd,” Roper says. “You said there was something weird about that. It raised your suspicious hackles.”
It did—a few of us thought we saw hints of red flags. The company hadn’t published any peer-reviewed data. Colleagues had heard unconfirmable rumors of shenanigans inside the company. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a story. We’d just have to figure out how to handle all that. WIRED had been, in years past, overly credulous, especially of scientific claims. But primarily WIRED covered innovation and stuff that sounded futuristic. This felt like it qualified.
“I remember that with dramatic irony, looking back,” Roper says.
Holmes agreed to an interview, and Roper went down to the Valley, to Theranos’ offices. She was only the second reporter to be there, and she got the performance that Holmes would become famous for. “There’s a lot of weird things about her. She was speaking in this strange, low voice. She was wearing a Steve Jobs outfit—black turtleneck,” Roper says. “She seemed like she was very precisely trying to project something.” (That first WSJ story ran with an illustrated caricature; WIRED shot a photo, professionally styled, of Holmes in her signature look.)
They spent an hour talking. Roper got her blood drawn, a tiny pinprick from the tip of her finger. “I said, ‘I’d love to see the box, can I follow my blood sample?’” Roper says. “They said, absolutely not.” Company reps implied it was a health-and-safety issue.
Instead, Holmes took Roper to the Palo Alto Walgreens, one of the few where Theranos had actually set up shop. “That part seemed like a snow job,” Roper says. “It was clear even from my own basic research that it hadn’t rolled out.” The booth at Walgreens was not in service. Holmes told her the company was going to open Walgreens labs across the Southwest.
Roper’s blood results came back. “The panel they took was similar to a panel I’d just had. I looked at them, and they matched,” Roper says. That seemed roughly confirmatory, at the time. It’s impossible to know now how it pulled that off, but later it turned out Theranos maintained a fully kitted-out lab in its Palo Alto offices, in addition to the lab for the company’s supposed new tech.
Interview done, Roper drove back up to San Francisco, to WIRED. “It didn’t feel like there was a feature to do,” she says. The Walgreens stuff wasn’t happening yet; it was too hard to report out how the technology worked. What was hard, in retrospect, was validation. Roper and the bosses weren’t sure that investment money from bold-faced names made up for an absence of hard scientific evidence.
So Roper wrote it up as an interview—a Q&A. “It seemed more like an interesting founder story,” she says. Roper asked every hard question, and got answers. They just turned out to be lies. But Roper acknowledges some cracks in the story’s origin. “If she had not been a woman, I would have been less motivated. That was part of what compelled me,” she says. “I felt sympathetic to the idea of her outfit and her weirdness, because I related to the idea that she was passing in some way in that environment, needing to assert herself.”
It’s tempting to see in that a DEI-run-amok story. It isn’t. All of us at WIRED were trying to wrestle with sexism in the world we covered, and at our magazine. Holmes’ board was all non–Silicon Valley types—was that because venture investors and scientists had identified her as a bad risk, or was it because Silicon Valley venture capitalists don’t support women founders?
Just a month after Roper’s Q&A ran, a team of researchers at the Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that investors were far more likely to fund the same pitch if it came from a man than if it came from a woman—and that conventionally attractive men did even better. Today, roughly 75 percent of venture investors are men, and the proportions were worse a decade ago. There’s even research showing that male venture investors are more likely to promote women to partner if the men have daughters. Roper and WIRED were trying to fight that tide and ran aground on a grifter instead.
“Partially, yes, it’s a woman founder, and that’s a nice change of pace. It would’ve been nice if you guys could have beaten John Carreyrou and figured it out,” says Dave Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University who has read every issue of WIRED and uses them to teach a class about Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. “But it wasn’t a new, untested claim. It was an active fraud.”
It’s fair to imagine a timeline where WIRED dug in deeper and was more critical, or at least didn’t further drive the hype cycle. “That story and the way we photographed her was absolutely fuel to lauding her and drawing attention,” Roper says. “I do feel partially responsible for that.”
We probably were, but I’m not sure WIRED’s Q&A was any more or less credulous than stories other magazines did. I know I sound defensive here, but even WIRED’s rigorous fact-check process wasn’t designed to unmask fraud. We all got got; it’s easy to see red flags when they’re in the rearview mirror. Was it weird to believe a 19-year-old college dropout had noticed something about pathology and microfluidics no one else had? Sure, but as Karpf points out, the system valorizes those kinds of iconoclasts. Steve Jobs was a dropout, man!
“If she had done all the graduate work, she wouldn’t have been nearly as fundable. They would just find someone else to tell them the stories they want to fund,” Karpf says. “It’s the people promoting it who, I think, have a bunch of answering to do.”
In 2019, as Sam Altman was leaving his role leading the tech incubator Y Combinator to become CEO of OpenAI, he wrote a blog post extolling the virtue in founders with “too much self belief … almost to the point of delusion.” Venture investors will tell you they invest in people as much as ideas, and the ideas are sometimes early-days, or half-baked. The system encourages exaggeration—right up to the line of deception. It can favor charismatic hucksters. If Theranos’ technology didn’t quite work yet, well, that’s a core tenet of Silicon Valley: Fake it till you make it.
And for a long time, WIRED helped. The magazine touted big ideas, and sometimes those ideas turned out to be dumb. Sometimes we were too early; sometimes we were wrong. Pitch meetings for stories big and small were a bit of a Thunderdome, actually. Eventually we developed some heuristics to encode skepticism in the process. For architecture stories, renders weren’t enough—ground had to have been broken. Physical objects had to exist in physical space; reporters had to be able to visit a thing. A flying car had to, you know, fly. In stories about new drugs or medical devices, the gating rule became “phase 3 trials or get the fuck out.”
Today, every responsible tech journalist has had to don new kinds of armor to prepare for the future that WIRED helped create. It’s possible to marvel at robot cars navigating cities as if driven by ghosts—while acknowledging the ways they sometimes fail, are often remote-piloted by humans, and pose new questions about regulating Big Tech. It’s possible to be awed by generative artificial intelligence’s capabilities while also interrogating the motives and practices of the companies that build it. And, yes, the personal politics of tech trillionaires matter when they’re donating more than a quarter of a billion dollars to support one political party over another. All of that was probably WIRED’s responsibility back then; it’s everyone’s responsibility now.
The tech business hates all that, reasonably. Not rarely, some longtime Silicon Valley dude will learn I spent most of my career at WIRED and say something like, “What happened to that place? I miss the old, optimistic WIRED.”
But you know, in the same issue of the magazine that carried the Holmes Q&A, another of our colleagues, Bill Wasik, wrote an opinion piece touted on the cover as “Silicon Valley’s Douchebag Problem.” Wasik, today the science editor at The New York Times, wrote then that dead-eyed misbehavior in pursuit of profit would kill tech’s magical status. Peter Thiel–derived ideas about secession and business models that relied on surveillance capitalism risked a backlash that would burn it all down, Wasik warned. The Valley and its toys, he wrote, would end up “a punch line—a hallucination of a future that no one believes in anymore.”
Science and tech journalism have to be about more than investors and returns. The future is too important; the stakes are too high. Case in point: As part of Joseph Rago’s reporting on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, he got his finger pricked. Rago’s blood test results were back “by the time I walked out the door,” he wrote. “(Phew: all clear.)” Four years later, Rago, 34, died alone in his New York apartment.
The city medical examiner said the cause of his death was sarcoidosis, a rare (and rarely fatal), hard-to-diagnose inflammatory disorder. Doctors usually figure it out by excluding other possibilities. Rago didn’t even know he had the disease. But among its signs are elevated levels of vitamin D and angiotensin-converting enzyme. Maybe an honest blood test would have spotted it.
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