spaziolibero

Before reading about Bad Blood on GatesNotes I had never even heard the names Theranos or Elizabeth Holmes, and even after reading about it my first thought was "Meh. The rise and fall of a medical tech startup. How compelling (to directly quote Bill Gates) could it be?" The answer is: a whole lot, and then some. The story of how Holmes enthralled – for a while – investors, the press, politicians and the whole of Silicon Valley with very little more than her charisma, a meticulously cultivated image, and the promise of a diagnostic revolution way too good to be true, is utterly unbelievable, utterly terrifying and, in a way, utterly inevitable. Everyone in the tech world believed Holmes' promises precisely because they were too good to be true, and because they were precisely what they wanted to believe: that the young, lonely, unknown (and, it doesn't hurt, extremely attractive) genius had found a shortcut everyone said didn't exist; more: coul