Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford, and stunted moral growth
Most of what I know about Elizabeth Holmes, the wunderkind-billionaire-fraudster founder of Theranos, comes from the TV miniseries about her, The Dropout. This is to say that any insight I may have into her nature should be taken with many grains of salt. Still, it’s a free country, so I’m going to opine about her anyway.
The Dropout follows Holmes from being an ambitious high school student to a rising star at Stanford to the founder and CEO of a venture capital-backed startup. When Theranos’ technology did not live up to expectations, she took the lesson from the Silicon Valley VC community that she needed to project confidence and competence at all times. She fakes it until she makes it, essentially, but as the series progresses there’s dramatically more faking than making. Eventually her deceit comes to light, Theranos collapses, her fortune (and many others’) evaporates, and Holmes is sent to prison, where she resides as I write this.
While I again caution that The Dropout is fiction, it’s based closely in fact. And one undisputed fact is that Stanford University does not come across well. In fact, Stanford has had a run of bad publicity this past decade — just look at Sam Bankman-Fried, another wunderkind-billionaire-fraudster associated with the institution. (In fairness, Bankman-Fried is not an alumnus, but his parents were both Stanford faculty and he essentially grew up on campus; incredibly enough, his mother was a respected expert on ethics.)
It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that there’s a common denominator here — not necessarily the university itself but the Silicon Valley VC culture that encircles it, sniffing for the Next Big Thing. (Venture capital in America is focused overwhelmingly on the Bay Area; good luck getting their attention if you live in San Antonio instead of San Francisco.) The story is a tragedy, not just for the investors and employees but for Holmes herself. The demands the business world placed on the brilliant but awkward Holmes at an important juncture in her emotional development left her emotionally and morally stunted. She went through her 20s much admired but with no friends, no confidants (save her unhealthy romantic relationship with her company president), and essentially no ability to relate to other people in anything approaching a normal way.
Holmes and I are peers, as it turns out, briefly having been at our respective robber-baron universities at the same time. Both of us were academically driven, had high goals, and were eventually forced to deal with our failure to achieve them (although in my case I decided to leave a PhD program for a new career instead of committing wire fraud). It is hard to face that failure as a young, gifted person — to feel that you’ve let down the people who cheered you on and squandered your gifts. In time I realized that those people in fact loved me for who I was, not what I accomplished. If Holmes ever came to such a realization, it was only after making herself a pariah.
I can’t shake the thought that Holmes (assuming her portrayal in The Dropout was accurate) would have been better off at UChicago. The university has a reputation of attracting smart but socially awkward people — one reason I felt at home there — and Holmes would have been more likely to find peers on her wavelength. Furthermore, the school’s heavy emphasis on theory over practice would have channeled her ambitions to research instead of startups. With friends and no pressure to court investors, she could have followed a more traditional path, working towards a master’s and a doctorate while enjoying Doc Films and Scav Hunt with her dorm-mates. I have to wonder if living a life more ordinary wouldn’t have given her time and space to become a better, more complete person — more time to grow up.