BY EMILIE WEINBECK, FEATURES EDITOR
If you have not heard of Elizabeth Holmes before, you likely will hear about her in the next few weeks. Hulu has just released a series called “The Dropout,” which chronicles the Silicon Valley wrecking ball and her company, Theranos.
Holmes quickly came to fame after she dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to build a high-tech medical company that could run hundreds of blood tests with just a single drop of blood. But, the kicker of the Theranos story is that the company could never live up to its promises.
Throughout the life of the company, Holmes decided to resort to fraud and deceit to try and make her company seem more successful than it really was, which is still being settled in court to this day.
This Hulu series is the first dramatic retelling of Theranos’ rise and ultimate fall. Holmes is played by Amanda Seyfried, who embodies the CEO all the way down to her voice. Seyfried also does a really good job of humanizing Holmes in the early episodes of the series. In many reports from Theranos employees Holmes was described as a machine and someone who was hard to connect with. Seeing a more human side of her helps to lure viewers in to watch her eventual downfall.
The supporting cast of “The Dropout” is full of stars. William H. Macy plays Holmes’ childhood neighbor who just happens to be an extremely successful businessman in the medical technology industry. Macy later goes to battle with Theranos’ legal department to try and force Holmes to buy him out after he seeks patent approval for the technology Holmes is using.
Alan Ruck plays a Walgreens executive who falls into Holmes’ mystique. Stephen Fry plays the most tragic figure in the series, the head chemical engineer at Theranos who becomes legally trapped in Holmes’ deceit.
The Theranos empire started to fall apart in 2015 when a “Wall Street Journal” reporter, John Carreyrou, started reporting on a series of articles that questioned Theranos’ claims about its technology. As allegations started to spread about the accuracy of Theranos’ technology, Walgreens quickly ended its contract with Theranos and ended up suing them.
In January 2016, federal lab inspectors issued a warning to Theranos that their blood tests were posing a health risk to patients and that they needed to either stop what they were doing or change their technology to produce accurate test results. Theranos did nothing to change what they were doing and in 2017 the Securities and Exchange Commission started a fraud investigation.
In 2018, after Holmes paid the $500,000 fine issued by the SEC, she was indicted on fraud charges. Soon after the charges were announced, Holmes stepped down as the chief executive at Theranos and in September of that year the company was dissolved.
In January 2022, Holmes was found guilty of four fraud charges which included one wire fraud conspiracy count and three counts of substantive wire fraud. Holmes can face up to 20 years in prison plus a $250,000 fine that includes restitution. Right now, Holmes is free on bond and waiting for her sentencing hearing that is scheduled for Sept. 26, 2022.
“The Dropout” is eight episodes long and each new episode premiers on Thursdays at midnight.
