But in her case, reality refused to follow. Barnum, the great master of hucksterism and illusion, once counseled, “Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.” Elizabeth Holmes got the appearance of business part right. Even as she knew that she was spinning a fairy tale, she must have been thinking that if she just faked it long enough, eventually her engineers would figure it out and would make the fairy tale real. Holmes, too, had that ability - at least for a time. That’s why Tom Wolfe described the legendary Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, as radiating a “halo effect” and why people talked about Steve Jobs’ “reality-distortion field.” They could make you believe what otherwise seemed totally improbable. ![]() That is precisely what any great entrepreneur does as well. We call scammers confidence men (or, in Holmes’ case, a confidence woman) because they inspire you to believe in them, to put your confidence in them, in part because they themselves seem so confident in what they’re doing. More than that, the skills that define a successful entrepreneur - the ability to convince others to believe, to get investors to part with their money in the hope of a large return down the road, the ability to get workers to invest in what may turn out to be a pipe dream - are not all that different, ultimately, from the skills of the con artist. But in the moment that line is often fuzzier, since even honest entrepreneurs are often at first selling little more than an idea of what they hope to accomplish. In hindsight, we might see a clear line between a fraudster and an honest entrepreneur - between Elizabeth Holmes and Steve Jobs, for example. That has a lot of currency in a culture that has historically put a high premium on risk-taking and ambition and has, as a consequence, been fertile ground for fraudsters, as historian Edward Balleisen documented in his book “Fraud.” In other words, what Holmes leveraged was people’s fear of missing out. The reason? Walgreens didn’t want to take the risk that if it walked away from the deal, CVS would end up signing a deal with Theranos instead and that the tests would end up working. "Bad Blood" chronicles how it did so even though an outside consultant Walgreens had hired to vet the technology told the person in charge that Theranos had failed to deliver the data they’d promised and that he couldn’t verify that Theranos’ machines actually worked. In a Tuesday court filing, Ms Holmes stated that former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff, a key witness in her initial trial, visited her home on August 8 and told her partner that. In 2010 and early 2011, for instance, Walgreens began exploring a deal with Theranos to offer its tests in its stores. Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of fraud earlier this year, has asked for a new trial just weeks before she is set to be sentenced. ![]() What Holmes leveraged was people’s fear of missing out.Ībove all, what Holmes did was make investors and partners believe that the pain of not benefiting from Theranos’ upside would far outweigh any regret they might feel if the company failed to deliver.
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