Motley Fool Money - Theranos & the Power of a Good Story

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Theranos promised the world a breakthrough in blood-testing technology, until everything came crashing down in early 2018. Alex Gibney, director of the award-winning documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, discusses Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ talent for telling a story.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert. Who knows your industry understands your business write-offs and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop the whole way through. You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the app,

which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. With the Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Elizabeth Holmes was compared to Thomas Edison and hailed as the next Steve Jobs. She dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 and started Theranos, a company touting a breakthrough blood testing technology. At its peak, Theranos was worth $9 billion. But in early 2018, the SEC charged Elizabeth Holmes with fraud, and the company's value dropped to zero.

The rise and fall of Theranos and its founder is the subject of a documentary from Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney. When we talked last year, Gibney reflected on how good Elizabeth Holmes was at telling people a story, even when that story was a lie. What surprised me really was how effective she was, how many people fell for it, and how often when it came to a tipping point, all Elizabeth had to do was to talk to them, and people would be convinced. Tyler Schultz himself talks about it. Like he knew how bad things were in the lab, what he called the tiled world. And then he would go up to the carpeted world and have a conversation with Elizabeth, and she would just convince him.

And she had convinced his grandfather to basically doubt his own grandson. So you realize the power of storytelling. how effective it can be despite all the evidence. The trial of Elizabeth Holmes is set to begin in March of next year. Until then, you can find Alex Gibney's award-winning documentary, The Inventor, Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, on multiple streaming services. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.