The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing

I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...

It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"

Yes, 100%

Certain people were so desperate for the female Steve Jobs, that when a woman came along literally cosplaying Jobs, they jumped without asking any questions.

Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.

Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0].

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...

Yes, my daughter and I still will randomly say "worlds youngest self-made female billionaire" to each other and laugh when we hear someone use a phase that is only true because of an excessive number of qualifiers.

At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder

It's a wider take on [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law):

- young female founders running successful businesses appear to be exceptionally skilled because they have been fighting against the current for their entire life. And the future of that company is double-boosted: They have an exceptionally good founder at the helm, and that founder is going to get even more free media coverage than they normally would.

- ... therefore if I see a young female founder, say no more, I will extrapolate from historic facts and conclude that the company is highly likely to be successful.

- ... and Goodhart's Law kicks in. Whether it is because those with intent to defraud realize what they need to do / they were always around but are now no longer filtered out, or it's simply because the Constanza-liars (they believe their own lies) are not being reality checked anymore doesn't matter: The measurement tool 'is a young female founder' has lost all its predictive power.

- even worse, if the relevant parts of society (the editors of financial newspapers, the bigwigs at investment corps) don't sniff the change in the wind fast enough, we get a new oversimplified yardstick: Someone is going to conclude 'might as well treat every young female founder as a fraud, because statistically they probably are!'

I think your innate sense here is the right answer: The original sin here is treating the identity of the founder as the only significant aspect. Not a heck of a lot of inquiry and skepticism about the promise of Theranos was required to start unravelling that whole mess.

Weird to put together "female and young": females are discriminated against, but it is older people, not younger ones, that are discriminated too. This ain't Japan, were seniority is king. This is America, where you are in decline after 30.

Have you ever wondered the same about other scams? Who else do you think was shaped "correctly"? Also, isn't affinity fraud most types of fraud?

She cosplayed Steve Jobs with the sweater, had obviously studied the west coast CEO bullshit trope stuff, and everything and used her earnest attractive nature to dupe a bunch of well known old men to endorse her.

Being female was a part of the grift but not the most notable. Many male grifters do the same thing without the girl power thing.

Being female is key for the sympathy play after the fact, and this little exercise to fish for a pardon from POTUS with a documentary. She went from Steve Jobs Girlboss to exploited victim, boo hoo.

I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.

It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.

Word to wise entrepreneurs.

Somewhat relevant from The Economist.

> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...

Or the other way: The reason the scam was caught was because people were looking for flaws. Society gives a lot of grace to male scammers.

Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.

Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...

Same exact thought when this trailer came across my feed. "Oh, who did A24 get to play Holmes, she looks familiar somehow." hahaha

wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magic

Although I’m fully expecting actor shenanigans in the full documentary, I think the section in the trailer might actually be her for real

After the complete mind melting of 2 seasons of "the rehearsal", this was my exact path too

(from the trailer) Holmes' mouth reminds me of the Amazon logo. Not just the shape. Also the complete disconnect between the commonly held meaning of a smile and the entity which is currently using it.

My worst nightmare would be to wake up in a room with SV tech execs, something like her + zuck + musk + altman, legit impossible to tell if they're human or skinwalkers

What an incredible trailer. So simple but so communicative and almost gave me goosebumps, very well made.

Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.

Holy moly, that was unsettling.

It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.

she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...

now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)

You mean marketing and engineering.

Oh I'm going to use this:

"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"

How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.

(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)

And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.

There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?

Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm

I’m not an expert at body language, but I think anyone can see she is trying really, really hard to appear friendly and trustworthy. But when someone is trying that hard to convince you they are benign, it makes you suspicious.

My brother has to remember to blink. (Thyroid or something, he's cagey about sharing diag. I suspect Grave's Disease.)

His unflinching stare into the eyes of interogation, while telling obvious lies, got us out of lots of trouble.

It does seem that way, half-way through they switch from "Billy" to "Bobby"

At least it's not opus level unreadable amirite?

Bobby-Sunny=Billy

it's an embeddings things, you know

In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.

I get that musk frequently underdelivers and has gone insane recently, but what he’s done with spacex and Tesla is genuinely impressive. So I’m not sure what the hell do you mean, what exact standard?

This is explained in the article. Including the hurting brain.

Read the article then.

Meh, from the documentaries I have seen and reading about her, to me it seems that she is hungry for attention. She will do whatever she vmcan to get attention, and she has succeeded once more with this documentary. She is also getting your money.

I dont understand why dont people stop beating that death horse. She is a scanner and fraudster. She defrauded a lot of people and is in jail for that. Move on. Let her rot in the obscurity in she belongs to