Elizabeth Holmes, the blond, blue-eyed, non-blinking former wunderkind of Silicon Valley, is on trial for mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. The former founder and CEO of Theranos convinced the world she could design a blood-testing device that would revolutionize the healthcare industry by allowing hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single drop of a patient’s blood. She was going to change the world, according to her and the incredible number of people who believed her, based on practically no evidence and a lot of lies. (Oops. Alleged lies.) She faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The twelve charges she faces allege she deceived investors, doctors, and patients for a five-year period from 2010 to 2015.

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That’s a lot of alleged deceit. She’s pleaded not guilty.

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Her detractors, and the prosecutors handling the case, say that she intentionally defrauded people by lying about a device she knew was never going to have the capabilities she claimed. Her fans and defense attorneys say she fell prey to the fake it till you make it ethos of Silicon Valley startup culture. She was blinded by her indefatigable work ethic that had her working incredibly long hours, every day, with no vacations or breaks for fifteen years, in pursuit of her dream.

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She’s not guilty because she worked hard and believed everything she was (allegedly) lying about would eventually, miraculously, turn out to be true. If only her visualization techniques had been better. Did she try reading The Promise?

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It’s not me; it’s you

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Also charged and to be tried in a separate trial is former Theranos COO, and ex-lover of Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who Holmes is now possibly planning — according to recently unsealed court filings — on blaming for the alleged lawbreaking. She’s painting herself as a victim of psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse from her 10-year relationship with Balwani, who Holmes first met when she was 18 and still in high school, and Balwani was a married, $40 million dollar dot-com-bubble multi-millionaire.

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There are plenty of abusive men in the world who prey on younger women. But there are plenty of women who go after rich older men, too. Maybe some women do that when they already have visions in their head, at the legal age of 18, of being a start-up entrepreneur like Steve Jobs, and might need some advice and perhaps money from a rich older man with experience in tech.

Probably those two scenarios can happen at the same time, like two vipers forming a circle by each devouring the other from the tail up.

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It’s probable that people are noticing that the white woman is planning to attempt to blame the brown man for all the alleged fraud and collusion, when she was the one getting all the fame and most of the fortune, before Theranos bled out.

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It’s doubtful that people are going to believe the scenario of Elizabeth Holmes as the wide-eyed, unblinking innocent being taken advantage of by an older male predator. The facts seem to be more easily interpreted as her being a ruthlessly ambitious young woman of legal age and sound mind who was willing to do whatever it took to conquer Silicon Valley and become the bossest of girl bosses, and who will now point her finger at whoever she has to in an attempt to avoid going to jail.

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To be fair, lots of people would rather throw an ex under the bus than go to jail, even without accusations of abuse or narcissistic avarice in the relationship. Most women would say that if you text your lover that he is the breeze in the desert for you, your water, and ocean, and that you’re meant to be together, and he texts back Ok, you should be able to personally run him over with a bus yourself. But she’s probably not going to be able to blame-shift her way out of this one.

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I Appreciate Your Support

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Holmes still has her supporters, including three women Holmies who showed up at the trial dressed like her, and pockets of additional Holmie fandom on various social media platforms that may or may not be practicing irony and satire in their lauding of their favorite girl boss. Probably more the former, but who knows? Society loves a b̵a̵d̵ ̵b̵o̵y̵ girl boss. (At least until they find out they’re not getting their investment money back.)

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...an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who specializes in the personality disorder of psychopathy, has a theory about the kinds of people who celebrate those who are widely regarded as having behaved immorally or antagonistically…Holmies may think, “If someone so competent as Elizabeth Holmes could be taken advantage of so badly, that might help explain some of the problems that I’ve had with people taking advantage of me as well.”

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They see themselves in Elizabeth Holmes and think she may be a good person deep down. She made mistakes. Doesn’t everybody? And isn’t it harder when you’re a girl? Don’t you have to work twice as hard as the boys? Shouldn’t she get a girl boss mulligan for her effort?

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(It’s probably hard for the average person to even conceive of Elizabeth Holmes being described as someone so competent who could be taken advantage of so badly. Someone please take advantage of me by giving me $700 million dollars of investment cash for a product that has to defy physics to actually work, while putting me on magazine covers, inviting me to fancy parties with powerful people, and telling me I’m a genius. I’ll wait.)

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Holmes’ father-in-law — a rich hotel magnate — is attending the trial. He first showed up there as a concerned citizen who called himself Hanson and defended Holmes to trial reporters. (Am I way off in thinking it’s possible the Holmies cosplayers are not who they seem to be at first glance, either?) There always seem to be a lot of people with considerable assets (almost all old white guys) ready to help Elizabeth Holmes. Men defended her at every turn against other men who were asking questions she couldn’t or didn’t want to answer. You have to hand it to her in some respects. Maybe I’ll dig up a turtleneck and learn not to blink.

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Holmes had an amazing ability to convince people to believe in her and her business vision enough to give her large sums of money, starting with investments from a long-time friend of her father, and the father of a childhood friend whose investment firm handed her a million dollars. Eventually, she had a slew of rich investors of the caliber of Rupert Murdock and Carlos Slim, and a board of directors that started with George Schultz, an ex U.S. secretary of state. At various times, Theranos’ board also included another former U.S. secretary of state, a former U.S. secretary of defense, a future U.S. secretary of defense, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, two former U.S. senators, the former CEO of the largest construction company in the U.S., a former director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the former CEO of an American multinational financial services company. That’s a whole lot of old white male, connected, powerful mojo going on there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you want money, power, and connections, it’s best to go where money, power, and connections reside. I personally like old white guys. I know a bunch of them. But were there no girl bosses available to serve on the board? Not even a women boss? Not a one? Nowhere? Hmmm.

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“There’s a place in hell for women who don’t support women.”

— Taylor Swift, quoting Katie Couric

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I don’t think I’m being a non-supporter of women by doubting that sexism in Silicon Valley played a deleterious role in Elizabeth Holmes’ decision to take $700 million dollars in investment capital for a machine that never worked well enough to do what she claimed, and which some argued was impossible from the beginning. Being a woman seemed to have helped — not hindered — her, until people figured out her machine was a fraud. People so loved the idea of a woman making a huge splash at the helm of a high-tech company that they took her unblinking, blue-eyed assurances as a substitute for due diligence.

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Fake it till you Make it

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It’s not okay to lie and cover up what is wrong with your product just because you may believe you’ll be able to make it work someday, even if a bunch of people have told you you’re a genius and you really like having your picture on the cover of magazines. The first rule of Tech Titan Club is that if you’re going to fake it till you make it, there has to be at least some chance of the making it part actually happening. (Okay, I made up that rule, but so do the tech titans so I don’t feel bad.) FITYMI might work if you’re talking about software code that isn’t perfect yet, or social media users who haven’t quite materialized, or a CEO highlighting the most optimistic numbers on a financial projection when meeting with investors. But it doesn’t work if you’re talking about taking someone’s blood, and giving patients faulty test results that tell them they’re about to miscarry a baby, or that they have cancer, or are HIV positive. Bad healthcare is not the same as buggy software on a smart phone.

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Elizabeth Holmes is not a genius, unless talking smart people into investing in your non-working technology is a kind of genius. Or that it’s genius to have a finely honed hybrid persona of attractive (but not too attractive) blond female meets super-smart, nerdy, quirky, male-projecting tech titan. Dressing like Steve Jobs, staring like Mark Zuckerberg, and adopting a fake, male baritone voice while you lean forward with man-spreading, leg-crossing body language is also not genius. It was clever, though. For a while.

There’s a social media opinion that even though what Holmes allegedly did was wrong, it’s still a kind of girl boss triumph that women can infiltrate the boy’s clubs by being business villains just like the men. She might be guilty, but it’s still a feminist issue because tech guys get away with fraud all the time. Why is she being prosecuted when they aren’t?

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Trying to be as abominable as bad male bosses should not be a bullet point in the girl boss manifesto. Grown-up women rarely want to be the villains, because we have often been blamed for what we aren’t even responsible for, all the way back to the story of Eve. Adam probably picked and ate the apple all by himself while Eve was washing the fig leaves, and then pointed the finger at Eve.

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Reading lofty quotes from Elizabeth Holmes, one might even speculate that she thought of her work (and by extension, herself) as God-like. And while there are plenty of men in the tech world who overestimate their importance and perhaps badly influence people’s lives, Holmes put herself in a more likely-to-be prosecuted situation by working in health care technology. Theranos being a biotech company raised the stakes and allowed the prosecution to contend that the health of private citizens was at risk from her, which might be considerably harder to prove in other cases of questionable Silicon Valley male tech titan behavior.

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If she had steered clear of trying to design technology that influences life and death decisions, she might be sitting in her umpteeth meeting with venture capitalists right now, scooping up girl boss investment cash on her latest endeavor, instead of sitting in a courtroom.

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Patriarchy Schmatriarchy

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Here’s the thing about all the talk about sexism and feminism and a woman competing in the male-dominated tech industry. Holmes isn’t a feminist. If the king of the patriarchy had offered to let Elizabeth Holmes sit on the patriarchy board and be the only girl boss patriarchal tech titan, she would have said, Yes, thank you, I deserve to be here because I’m a genius. Screw all those other women. (Unless they have money to give me, or they want to work ninety-hour weeks at my company.)

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Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t taking on the patriarchy. She was colluding with it. I’m not getting on the because-sexism bandwagon on behalf of Elizabeth Holmes.

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She was not a girl boss furthering the cause of women. Even the idea that it’s required to make a concerted, above-and-beyond effort to advance women and feminism when you’re a woman in business is a little femifascistic, if you’ll pardon the expression I just made up. Kudos to anybody who advances equality and the admirable ideals they believe in while creating jobs and paying their taxes. But if a woman wants to start a company and be a good CEO, and pursue her happiness while not lying, bilking investors, and committing fraud, that’s enough. Besides, for all of Holmes’ feminist marketing, where are the women she helped? Mentored? Inspired? She talked the girl boss talk, and cashed the girl boss checks, but she didn’t want to walk the girl boss walk. She talked about revolutionizing health care and saving people’s lives, but chose her own interests and aspirations over other people’s welfare at every opportunity, from investors, to the people who worked for her, to the people who received wrong diagnoses from a technology she knew didn’t work. (Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.)

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Inspiration

 

Actually, she did inspire one woman: her former employee, Erika Cheung, who whistle-blew Holmes and Theranos into regulators after raising issues over quality control and patients receiving wrong results on blood tests, and had her concerns ignored by the company. Cheung sounds like more of a girl boss than Elizabeth Holmes ever was, but I bet she wouldn’t want to be called one. Death to the girl boss designation. It’s sexism lauded as feminism. Women don’t need it. The girl boss is dead, long live the boss who happens to be a woman.