Citation Needed - Elizabeth Holmes

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American businesswoman convicted of fraud in connection with her health technology company Theranos.[2] Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, and its valuation soared in the early 2010s after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick.[3][4] In 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company.[5] In the following year, as accusations of fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero,[6] and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".[7]

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Noah and I'm going to be introducing you to this amazing investment opportunity today and I'm going to try to answer all the questions that you might have, but my associates, who are lucky enough to get in on this podcast on the ground floor are going to be happy to assist with anything I miss. So let me introduce you to Cecil, Heath, and Eli. All you need to do is get five of your friends to buy in on the second. floor. We're calling it Patreon.

It's going to be great. So you know, toll booth? You could be on the toll booth on the internet for your friends. Now, they're their boss. Before we can explain to you how the citation needed podcast is going to revolutionize your life and the life of your friends, I want to acknowledge all the,

you imagine the person for whom this is their first episode, right? Sorry. They're just like, oh, look, every other podcast. Right, right. So anyway, thanks to our patrons if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks. And believe me, you do. Be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

Maybe you'll get a few testimonials from them. Maybe you won't. And with that out of the way, tell us Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today? Elizabeth Holmes. All right. So, Eli, you read the tabloids. Are you ready to sensationalize? I sure am, no.

That's a retro joke. Go make sense in a minute. So tell us, Eli, who was Elizabeth Holmes? It feels like you can't open a newspaper these days without reading about a so-called AI expert, tech guru, or futurist, warning us about the coming AI apocalypse. Before the public release of the first version of ChatGPT, computer scientists with terminal degrees were warning us

that AI would end the world as we know it, that it would surpass human intelligence in less than a year, that it even had a soul. During COVID, back in 2020, public health experts and medical doctors warned us that it would be five years before we had a COVID vaccine. I mean, there are articles from April that you're saying they're going to be 12 to 18 months out, but who's counting? I mean, come on. A lot of the AI experts, Eli, is dismissing a so-called are also the ones that built that shit. So, yeah.

Neither here nor there. No interruptions during the opening. Those are the rules. Don't say lies during the opening. regular Tom's their lives? What? Because he's dead.

He gets to do it. Tom is despair incarnate. And he says it every time. That's not a lot. Exactly. NASA regularly just slams a robot into the surface of Mars because they measured once and cut twice.

Regularly? Yeah. What you need to understand is that these people are wrong, not because they're lying or don't understand their topic of expertise. Quite the opposite.

These people are wrong because nobody Nobody is dumber than a smart person who's convinced that they're right. Today's story is about a brilliant young woman who was absolutely convinced that she had made the most important discovery in the history of medicine, and absolutely nobody could convince her otherwise. Today's story is about Elizabeth Holmes. Okay, that is accidentally the perfect setup, Eli, as it turns out.

What's great about this story is that I'm stupid and an idiot in the way she was. And so it's like telling my own tale. It's very cathartic. It's sort of a Ulysses thing. A quick and ironic caveat before we jump in. A lot of this story could be bullshit. A lot of the stuff about her childhood that I'm going to talk about today comes from Holmes herself. Who we will learn is not the most reliable source in the world.

And a lot about what happened at her company, Theronos, comes from people covering their asses for a fraud. they were almost certainly participating in. So what I'm saying is, if you'd like a completely accurate and well-researched version of this story, I don't know, go get it from somewhere fucking boring. The Fox News Credo right there for Realized things here. I read books of information.

Boo! Nerd, nobody cares. Let's go. I have a BFA. Why are you listening to me about literally anything? Elizabeth Holmes was born in 1984 in Washington, D.C. to a well-connected family that was, by the time she was born, somewhat less well-connected than it felt it deserved to be.

Her father, Christian Holmes IV, liked the finer things in life and was, by many accounts, obsessed with financial and social advancement. He moved his family frequently for his career, working for a number of government agencies before eventually becoming a vice president at Enron. One day, young lady, all this lying will be. be yours. Okay, Enron, that's

going to fit nicely. So, whenever I talk about breeding licenses, everybody's like, blah, blah, blah, that's you, Janet. But like, come on. Like, come on. This time, I feel like, the fact that he's got the fourth in there.

I mean, so young Elizabeth adored her father and wanted more than anything to impress him on his terms. She was an awkward kid already, and with that much moving around she found herself lonely and friendless. So young Elizabeth filled her time designing fabulous and profitable inventions.

At age seven, she filled an entire notebook with detailed engineering drawings for a time machine. At age nine, when she was asked by a relative, what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied a billionaire. Okay, I just want to be clear. She did not draw a detailed engineering drawings from a fucking time machine, right? Because that's not a thing. That's not a real fucking thing. She drew some little kid bullshit with a line pointing to something that said time gas with a backwards G.

Don't expect history to put your bullshit on the fridge, Elizabeth, okay? There. In high school, she taught yourself C-flux capacitor in the wrong place. I'm sorry. I was doing it. If it's a fucking kid, if she's just a 7-year-old, I wouldn't give her shit for it. But come on. You're going to fucking adult trying to sell me this shit.

What is this a stick figure of a time machine? That's stupid. Dumbass kid. It's fair. It's fair. This wouldn't even work. In high school, she taught herself C++ programming in her spare time and started her first business, selling compilers to Chinese universities. When the language barrier slowed her business down, she spent three summers taking college-level Mandarin classes at Stanford before she graduated.

Nothing was going to stop her dreams. Well, I would push back on that, but it would be a spoiler. No, go ahead. In 2002, she enrolled at Stanford to study chemical engineering, and she was good. named a president's scholar as a freshman. The university gave her a stipend to design her own research project. But that was not enough for Elizabeth. Now, she walked into the lab of Channing Robertson, one of Stanford's most distinguished chemical engineering professors, and asked if she could work alongside his PhD students.

Not in four years, not in seven years now. He said, no. She came back. He said no again. She came back again. And then eventually he said yes. and she became the only undergraduate in his lab. Robertson would later say, quote,

when I finally connected with what Elizabeth fundamentally is, I realized that I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Hey, Professor, you're kind of just staring into my eyes right now. It's weird. I don't know. So, like, I can work in a lab or I can't, like, you're just staring. After her freshman year, she went to work at the genome, Institute of Singapore testing for SARS.

What that job involved specifically was drawing blood from patients with syringes and whatever else she took away from that summer, she came back from Singapore convinced that the syringe was the enemy. She told the New Yorker later, quote, I really believe

that if we were from a foreign planet and we were sitting here and said, okay, let's brainstorm on torture experiments. The concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking blood out slowly, while the person watches probably qualifies. Hey, Markler, the thing you came up with,

kind of like a low-level torture, but it's just like kind of mine. No ideas that are bad in a brainstorm, though, I get it, I get it. Anyway, why are we doing this, though? I guess my bigger question, like, why are we doing a torture brainstorm? Now, in Elizabeth's defense,

she is right. Needle fear is a real and widespread medical problem. patients regularly skip life-saving care to avoid needles. So have they tried not being a bunch of fucking cussies? Jesus Christ. They am not. It doesn't work. It's also wildly wasteful.

Some blood tests draw 40 to 50 times more blood than they'll be testing. What are you a fucking vampire? You can make more. Wasteful. And while we're spoiled with rubber gloves and alcohol pads galore here in the States, in places where sanitation is difficult or impossible, blood tests can be deadly. Okay, well, I can't do a fucking rule of threes now,

God damn. So she had an idea. What if you could run hundreds of blood tests from a single drop of blood? No needles, no labs, just a finger prick, a little science.

That hurts too, though. Yeah, that's actually worse. That's not surprising. Let me go. That's terrifying. A little science and the answers to everything that was wrong with you

could be yours. Okay, but what if we put a tap in the body so whenever you needed blood you could just pour it out like decaf coffee? What about that? Is that your idea? My fucking father-in-law had one of those towards the end of his life.

Jesus is great. I thought I was making up a torture device. It was his dick, to be fair. Oh. She beat a lot of blood. Yikes. In September of 2003,

still technically enrolled at Stanford, she filed her first patent application on her idea for a drug delivery patch. She would eventually pivot back to her diagnostic idea, but she called her company, Theranos, a portmanteau of therapy and diagnosis.

Okay, but they weren't doing the therapy. They were just doing. They also weren't doing the diagnosis. We're like liagnosis. Right. It's also, it's a syllabic stumble from the Greek personification of death and two letters away from the guy who wanted to destroy half the universe. with a snap of his fucking finger.

What a stupid fucking name for your health thing. Yeah. Well, and his finger's going to be all owie because you prick it. The Infinity Gallagist has one pin in there somewhere and it touches. The Ochy Stone. Well, she believed in it. She dropped out, used her own college tuition money to see it, and started building what she was convinced would be the largest medical tech startup in world history. Cool.

And she called up her dad. Hey, dad, I started a company. What were you telling me the other day about accounting? You said something like, you just like put whatever you want. Numbers aren't real and I'm doing great. You said something like that. Okay, Keith, you're actually really close because Elizabeth didn't just start a company. She started a new version of herself.

In 2003, the Silicon Valley Revolution was deeply ensconced in the American mind. And the symbol of that revolution was Steve. jobs. Who you will recall sat with his bare feet soaking in public toilets. He did. He did. He did indeed. Holmes had been obsessed with jobs since childhood. Not inspired by, obsessed with. She wore black turtlenecks

every single day owning approximately 150 of them. 150. Okay. So like, I could understand the first, you know, hundred or so as you're collecting. It feels like you'd have a few moments along the way after maybe 100 of thinking, you know, maybe it's not the turninx. That's the key to Steve Jobs is success.

Also, there's a point where you're just being lazy with your laundry. That's what I was like 150 of them. Now you're making it six months without a laundry. That's on you. Yeah. I mean, I get it, but I just have the one shirt. She held her company-wide meetings at the same times that she read Jobs had held his. She hired former Apple designers and executives specifically to cultivate the Apple aesthetic inside Theranos, asking them how Apple offices had looked, felt, and even apparently smelled.

Smell. Well, it turns out it was morning napalm and turtlenecks mostly. And toilet feet. She even had her photographs taken through a slimming lens so her neck would look thinner in the way that his did. And she kept the Theranos office at 64. five degrees very hot. Cold enough that employees wore sweaters to work, specifically, so that she could wear her turtlenecks without sweating through them. She also, and we have hinted at this, started faking her voice. The voice she used professionally was three to four registers lower,

a deep, deliberate baritone that was so unsettling. It's actually hard to believe she was faking it. Employees reported that at company parties, after a few drinks, it would like slip back up into normalcy. And Holmes later told the New York Times that the whole persona, the voice, the uniform, the relentless eye contact, all of it was a, quote, character she had created, end quote. And it worked. Oh, man, I'm surprised she didn't actually sound like a didgerie do. I didn't, man. Well, yeah, look, we're all a fucking character we created to some degree or another. It's just most of us created less of an insufferable prick of a character. Okay. Speak for yourself.

Side note that I couldn't really fit anywhere else into the story. Elizabeth famously would bring a large, poorly behaved husky named Balto to work on a regular basis. Balto's hair would contaminate samples when Elizabeth would stop by labs. And he wasn't house trained. So he would like piss and shit all over the office. He's got a piss and shit somewhere. But my favorite part is when people would ask what breed Balto was. was she would say he was a wolf.

Hey, Liz, just quick thing. Lots of clients that we've been testing. They have diabetes and mange is what it says from the test results. And they're mad about the head cone. They're fucking fine. They're fine. At its peak, Pheranos was valued at $9 billion.

Which all adds of that fact alone disproves the idea that capitalism is a meritocracy. Sure does. the chair does. Yeah. And Holmes had assembled a board that read like a state department's seating chart. George Saltz, Secretary of State under Reagan,

Henry Kissinger, awesome dude and former Secretary of State under Nixon. Nobel Prize winner. Yeah, right. Peace prize. Who described Holmes as having a, quote, ethereal quality. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense.

James Mattis, retired four-star general and future Secretary of Defense. Bill Frist, former Senate Majority Leader, Gary Ruffead, retired four-star Navy Admiral, 12 members total.

Two former secretaries of state. Two former or future secretaries of defense and assorted architects of American foreign policy. What this astonishingly prestigious board was conspicuously short on was people with actual expertise in medical diagnostics. Nice.

Because Elizabeth didn't need people who knew things. She knew things. What she needed... was power. Well, they might not have known a lot about science, but they all shared a love of blood. If you need power, you could talk to Enron. Oh, it's too late.

That doesn't mean that her board wasn't curious. When James Mattis asked whether the technology was validated, Holmes personally told him that the devices were currently being used in Medevac helicopters in Afghanistan and in operating rooms at UCSF. She told him it had been approved by the FDA and the WHO. None of this was true. Mattis later testified that Holmes was his primary source

for all information about the company and its technology. He believed her because she believed her. And, I mean, besides, who would be stupid enough to lie about something as obvious as all that? Yeah, right. Well, as Americans, we always know that the answer to the who, who'd be stupid enough to question is Americans. So we're going to take a quick minute to brace ourselves. And while we do, we'll kick it over to a little apropo of nothing.

And now, Cidation Needed Presents, if Elizabeth Holmes had met even one honest person. Hey, Elizabeth. Hello, Heath, right? Sorry, what are you doing there? What do you mean? You're doing like a fake voice thing. No, I'm not.

I talk like this. No, no, you don't, because nobody does. Can we begin our meeting? Okay, I guess, but like, for the record, you're doing a fake voice. No, I'm not. You are, though. You are. So, yeah, okay, show us a machine.

Yes, our machine can do hundreds of blood tests on a single drop of blood. No, no, it can't. Yes, it can. No, no, it can't. Yes, it can't. Cool. How does it work in your imagination? I can't tell you it's a secret. Is it the secret that it doesn't work?

No. Yeah, it is. That's the secret. Okay. Well, this has been crazy. And I don't know how this worked on anyone ever. Also, you brought a dog. He's a wolf. No, he's not. I can see him. Not a wolf. And we're back when we last left off, America's top diplomats from the previous three generations were about to learn about checking, I think.

Eli? They were not. No. Mad Dog Mattis was not the only person she fooled. Over the course of Theranos's rise, Elizabeth raised over $700 million from investors, many of whom never saw the Edison machine in action. But in 2013, Theranos finally had its big break. Walgreens invested approximately $140 million. to open 40 wellness centers inside Arizona pharmacies,

where regular people could walk in, get a fingerprint test, and get results. Around the same time, Safeway spent $350 million building out clinics in more than 800 supermarkets for Theranos machines. My favorite detail about the Safeway deal is that during the trial of the technology at Safeway's own headquarters, Safeway's executives received results so,

alarming that one false cancer flag had to be corrected by a different lab before it caused a full internal panic. Safeway signed the contract anyways. Guys, we're going to sign it anyway. So Elizabeth, she was probably playing with her Steve Jobs blood collection. She had that. Jesus, the one cancer. It's fine. We're signing. We're signing the deal. They did. All in all, between 2013 and 2016, Theranos ran 1.5 million test results for nearly 176,000 patients. More than 10% were eventually voided

or corrected. A pregnant woman named Brittany Gould was told by Theranos that she had miscarried. It's, it is not twins now. One patient was told she had HIV. She did not. That was hives.

That was a typo. You got that right, too. A breast cancer survivor was told her cancer might have returned. At might have We're asking questions We're asking important questions A man stopped taking his blood thinners Because his theranos results said he didn't need them

And then he later had a heart attack And then he died and didn't need them Like the tests I didn't have an answer for that Thank you whoever that was That was smart But look the truth is this We have no idea

The full scope of patient heart that Theranos caused because neither Theranos nor Elizabeth have ever admitted to any of them. And if she did, her fake voice actually doesn't register on human ears, so we wouldn't know. The truth of the matter was the Edison machine. Like a whale answers her. Yeah, right. The truth of the matter was that the Edison machine simply did not work. Like, at all.

There was, and is, no reason to believe that you can conduct most medical. tests from a single drop of blood, let alone multiple tests from the same drop of blood. I got to be honest, when I heard about this back in the day, I was like, oh, that's fucking cool. Yeah, we all did. That's sweet. I was like, oh, yeah, why wouldn't it just be a drop?

It's all in there. It's fucking crazy. We all expected someone looked in the fucking box, Heath. That's what we expect. Yes. I didn't put in like, you know, $350 million. I was on board. I would have gone.

I would have gone. file in Arizona, gotten a drop. So for approximately 95% of the tests, Theronos actually ran, the company used standard commercial analyzers made by Siemens, purchased through a secret subsidiary specifically so investors and partners

would never know they existed. When the Edison machines produced results that were different from the standard analyzers, they were deleted. But when the numbers came back in range, they counted them. So, okay, so she had intended the Wheelow, ailments them ultimately.

And then it all came crumbling down. Thanks to a research engineer named Tyler Schultz. Tyler did not want to be a tech billionaire. He did not want to revolutionize the medical industry. He actually didn't even want to work for Theranos. What he wanted was a job.

And his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Schultz, was on the board. So he took it when he was offered one. Wow. Something, something, the power of one honest man, something, something doesn't trip over the goddamn metal detector on his way into the ballroom. Exactly. So when Tyler started working at Theranos...

Inshallah, Noah. So when Tyler started working at Theranos, he was surprised at how little medical research was being done. He found it incredibly difficult to access the machines he was supposed to be testing. And when he was finally given access to an Edison machine, Tyler and his team ran syphilis. tests on themselves as a check. More than 20% of those tests came back positive. They reported the problem internally.

Nothing happened. Tyler went to his grandfather and his grandfather told him he was wrong saying, quote, Elizabeth has told me that Theranos really can do all the things it says it can do, end quote. Yeah, grandson, you do have syphilis and mange. So that's obviously what you put the

comb back on, by the way. He also added, quote, they can convince me that you're wrong. And I do think you're wrong. My last boss was Ronald Reagan and he believed in astrology. Why can't you be normal? Yeah. Astrology, hell, he believed in trickle town economics.

Oh, bigger fairy tale. So Tyler contacted state regulators anonymously. And then he became a source for a Wall Street Journal reporter John Careyue, who had already begun quietly investigating the company that was very obviously fake. When Theranos discovered Tyler was talking to a reporter, they arranged a meeting at George Shultz's house. Tyler arrived expecting a private conversation with his grandfather, and then Theranos' lawyers came out of a back room and accused him of being a... Jesus Christ. Elizabeth Holmes rolls out a big spinny chair from the backroom.

I told you guys to make him come in the back room so I can do my thing. Fuck, now it looks stupid. Hold on. Give me a second. She sits down and spins it. Well, well, well, well. Come back in. Jesus Christ. I'm starting all over again. I fucked it the whole thing up. Now I look stupid. Tyler would spend the next three years and $400,000 of his family's money fighting Theranos' legal threats.

He was not invited to his grandfather's 95th birthday party that Elizabeth Holmes was Wolf. Carmius story. Happy birthday, Charles Stoltz game. Carrie used to say blood in the wall. than blood, huh? In October of 2015. Are you the peanuts guy? The FDA inspected, federal health regulators inspected.

Theranos's California lab was found to have deficiencies so serious it was shut down. Jesus. The company voided every Edison test result from 2014 and 2015. The $9 billion valuation was revised by Forbes to nothing. Oh. That's their exact. word. It was nothing. Walgreens

closed all 40 locations. Yeah. Look at Forbes. It's like the estimate is zero nothing. You all lust for saying that out loud. Yeah. Wall Greens closed all 40 locations. In 2018 the company dissolved and Holmes

and her partner Balwani were indicted on 11 federal charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. Cut to Balwani listening to this episode from prison going, finally I get a fucking mention. Jesus. The jury found Holmes guilty on four counts

of investor fraud and acquitted her on the patient counts. Balwani was convicted on all 12, investors and patients both. The restitution went to investors and corporate partners, not to the patients who had been told they had cancer or HIV or had lost a pregnancy. They hadn't lost.

But they will get a tariff dividend that Trump wins the midterm. So that's in their future. Holmes. Forbes, we're worth $5,000. actually. For her part, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months. Her trial had been delayed for the birth of her first child. She was visibly pregnant at sentencing, and she is currently serving her time at a minimum

security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up filling notebooks with engineering drawings and telling relatives with complete seriousness that she was going to be a billionaire. And in her defense for at least a while, she was right. Sort of. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? I think fake it till you make it only applies if you do eventually make it. Yeah.

And also, while you're committing, you have to make a single thing. It helps. Yeah. And are you ready for the quits? Please don't check any of the things I say. Okay.

That was her last words before she went to jail. Okay. So I think we can all agree that. Elizabeth Holmes is in fact a vampire who was just collecting blood. Oh! Turtlenecks were probably hiding the scar from when you got her. Oh, interesting. My guess.

What is her vampire name? Ooh. Hey, Theranosphorato. Nicely done. You can stop there. You can stop there. You just need you just need the one. I was trying to do other ones. I was like,

that's it. It's it. You know, sometimes when you get the right picture, you can stop taking pictures, man. Dr. Accula. Haas scrubs did it. Lestat meddling? Is that anything? All right.

So, how do I know that given the chance, Eli would have invested in Theranos? A, he had a Steve Jobs obsessed black turtleneck phase two. I did. It's true. B. Elizabeth Holmes

knew like so many science words. I've done it 100%. C. He just admitted it. D. The odds of Eli passing up on a bad financial decision are vanishingly small to begin with, or E, Heath still has the text thread where he talked Eli out of it. Can I go with secret answer E?

All of the above, and I'm not sure that the last one's a joke. And that's actually F with tracks with everything that's been said, yeah. All right, Eli, what's the title of Elizabeth Holmes biopic? A, antebody of evidence. broken marrow, C, oh, negative, where out thou, or D, there won't be blood. Dang. Can I go with D? There won't be blood? Correct. Correct.

All right. Looks like you swept the board, Eli. You are this week's winner. All right. Well, I'd like some factuality next week, so let's get a NOAA essay going. We'll see what we can do. All right, well, for Heath, Eli Cecil. What's the Cohn-Brother's movie?

Blood sample? Blood simple. It's the same. It doesn't work for the thing. Never mind. All right. Well, for Heath, Eli, Seasel, and eventually, Tom, I'm Noah. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We're going to be back next week. And by then, I'll be an expert on something else. Between now and then, be sure to check out citation needed and dear old dads where Tom also isn't. If you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod

or leave a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes. Connect with some social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. She's, she'll edit that part out if he dies before the episode. Yeah, no. And, you know, this episode comes out pretty soon. So head on a swivel, baby.

Maybe we just get it out like today. Yeah, early release. Like Tom.