Blood Simple
by Steve Sailer
June 13, 2018
Once the reelected Obama administration gave the okay for the diversity industry to begin shaking down Silicon Valley like it does everybody else, we began to read over and over that the reason there are few female tech founders is because the white male power structure leaves billion-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk just to spite women.
And yet, the industry’s most memorable story of recent years, as recounted in Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou’s page-turning new book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, is how young blonde Elizabeth Holmes became tech’s pioneering female self-made billionaire (on paper) despite not quite having gone through the formality of actually inventing her breakthrough medical gizmo.
Starting Theranos in 2003 as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Ms. Holmes specialized in charming elder statesmen with her vision of disrupting the blood-testing industry. Over the next dozen years, Ms. Holmes raised (and spent) about $900 million, and saw her half of the company’s stock valued at $4.5 billion. Carreyrou writes:
As much as she courted the attention, Elizabeth’s sudden fame wasn’t entirely her doing. Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men…. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.