Elizabeth Holmes

Nicole Jeffords (2022)

This is a drawing I recently did of Elizabeth Holmes, the ambitious young woman who dropped out of Stanford in order to pursue her ambitions as an entrepreneur in biotechnology. What I picked up most as I studied photos of her face, was just how crazy obsessive she is. She had planned to study chemical engineering, but didn’t seem to have a good grasp of the actual mechanics of her product — that is, she could hype it but lacked the lab experience to drill down very deep. But that didn’t matter. Her company, Theranos, was her baby, her religion. Whether the device she created to diagnose disease in a single drop of blood worked or not was beside the point. She had thrown her whole self into the project, so it had to work — and if it didn’t, she would pretend it did. The rest of the story is well-known. After being featured on the front cover of several important publications as one of the youngest and most successful self-made billionaires, she was expected to become the next Steve Jobs — a possibility that fell to the wayside when it was discovered she was a total fraud. I wonder if I would have picked up on trickery and deceit if her face had belonged to a stranger and I had no idea who she was.