“How Elizabeth Holmes’ House of Cards Came Tumbling Down” (Vanity Fair, 5119 words.)

Nick Bilton wrote this piece for Vanity Fair in 2016, two years prior to the publication of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup (which I must confess that I have yet to finish, but I am getting there.) It’s a piece which clearly profiles a now-famously delusional person, whose story rose to prominence again in the last year or two as the stories of other delusional scammers became the subjects of different stories much like this one. Bilton here profiles the things which are now widely known about Holmes: her jarringly deep voice, her obsession with Steve Jobs and subsequent affinity for black turtlenecks, undisclosed and professionally inappropriate relationship with an important employee. 

He also does well to shed light on many other things which have become well known details surrounding the massive and criminal decline of Theranos. Holmes dropped out of Stanford without having received her degree but having shared her idea for a patent: a device which would run thousands of tests on a pinprick’s worth of blood, tests able to determine a wide variety of future medical decisions a patient might make. Bilton does a great job of making sure that the reader knows that while this might be a good idea in theory, there’s absolutely no way that it worked. Holmes put people in harm’s way and swindled a massive amount of money out of a lot of prominent people (and a lot of people just looking to invest some of their savings into a Silicon Valley startup.)
I think there’s a lot of potential steals to be found here. I like a lot about the style of this piece. It does well to profile a person who is very clearly the villain of the narrative while also bringing in the perspectives of many other prominent figures like John Carreyrou, whose insistent reporting on this story was instrumental in bringing Holmes’ misinformation to light. This piece also uses a lot of photography from other prominent profiles on Holmes, such as the one in NYT, meaning that the reader gets to experience a lot of the other media produced to praise her. This is also a silly structural thing that pretty much all online works do now, but I love how easy this piece makes it to find other work referenced. Linking out like this is helpful when showing that there’s other work out there on the same subject that’s helping to bring together what you’ve written.