Elizabeth Holmes, the former entrepreneur who was convicted of one of the biggest frauds in business history, swapped out her trademark black turtleneck for an inconspicuous beige crewneck in a controversial New York Times profile published on Sunday. But even if a tiger makes an outfit change, it doesn’t change its stripes. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. The chronicler of America’s last gilded age died before Elizabeth Holmes and her black turtleneck ever came to prominence, but the former Theranos CEO and convict is testing that credo out with her new identity: Liz. But, as Fitzgerald predicted, her new persona isn’t being readily accepted by the public as authentic.
But what a first act Holmes had. Starting off strong, with assertions that Theranos could conduct over 100 tests on “just a few drops of blood” to detect everything from glucose levels to the presence of different antibodies, Holmes’ promises were soon revealed to be undeliverable. She was lauded as a game changer to the medical and tech world, with Fortune itself calling her “out for blood” while noting her youth, secrecy, relentlessness, and what seemed at the time like a mild-mannered nature. But The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou’s investigation of Holmes in 2015 revealed that the Edison device Theranos used to diagnose diseases was not all that it seemed; the company wasn’t using its own technology to provide results. “Theranos has struggled behind the scenes to turn the excitement over its technology into reality,” he wrote. From there, Holmes’ legacy unraveled.
