For the last few years, scammers and corporate con men and women (but especially women) who tricked America's elites have captured headlines. But in the last few months, the most prominent ones got the Hollywood treatment from major streaming sites: swindler-socialite Anna Sorokin in Netflix's "Inventing Anna," famous fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's "The Dropout," and WeWork's culty co-founders Adam and Rebekah Paltrow Neumann in Apple TV+'s "WeCrashed."
There's too much of this content out there for any one person to take in, unless you're me and you're obsessed with so-called "girlbosses," a term born in the Sheryl Sandbergian "Lean In" moment for women succeeding in the corporate world. It became a joke when many of the so-called girlbosses turned out to be as bad as the boy bosses, including, allegedly, the "Nasty Gal" founder who popularized the phrase. It's been zombified into a running internet joke in this post-Elizabeth Holmes moment and is usually half-aspirational and half-tongue-in-cheek.
This final crest in the media wave of these stories, which happened before COVID-19 hit, comes as America's richest men have made billions during a pandemic that saw millions of women lose jobs.
