The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

For those who have been unable to read the book Bad Blood about Theranos, this HBO documentary can help get you up to date on how the unimaginable happened. It's also easier to understand and remember the the events and people visually.

Visually this is a pretty clear and thorough depiction of the events. Clever blending of her walking around the office. It's nice to see the whistleblowers Tyler and Erika. And on the flip side Sunny Balwani the guy who helped sell the con.

Some faults. There are a few slower moments that could have been edited out. Some of the people who gave interviews were not that interesting. A lot of laughing by the interviewees. Too many shots of her scary stare, but she did blink once!

Looking forward to the movie with Jennifer Lawrence. It's good to watch this documentary before the movie comes out because movies can be confusing and it can be tough to figure out who is who.

Well, Elizabeth Holmes is still a mystery. Every media incarnation of hers (from magazines/newspapers to the book to this doc to the film version currently in production with Jennifer Lawrence) Holmes becomes a little more clear - and it's good to hear her infamously deep voice - but "The Inventor" hardly solves her. Didn't anyone know her in high school or college (short a time as that may have been)? Can't the filmmakers interview them? What about family? Surely someone must be willing to talk about her psyche. The people they interview is more or less the same as the book and hold no surprise in this medium, although Rochelle Gibbons was very powerful to hear, more so than the book. There were also opportunities in the doc to explore themes like Gen Y arrogance, the power of branding, and the cluelessness of companies like Walgreens - which did not do any vetting in the least...but they focused on the Silicon Valley Unicorn theme. It was a good watch, overall, especially if you like learning new and awful things about humanity and seeing some really awkward footage...like Elizabeth Holmes in a bouncy house. But the most harrowing segment-where "The Inventor" almost took off- was the focus on the (literally) hot mess inside of the Theranos machine. A lot of spilled blood, broken glass, and basic slime...all with the risk of transmitting fun stuff like Hepatitis to the many Theranos lab techs. But "The Inventor" is mostly a soft peddle of the Theranos story. It should have made much more of an emotional impact. I also suspect the folks whose health was damaged by Theranos's false diagnoses in the Arizona testing facilities are suing and therefore could not be filmed. Their filmed experiences would have been amazing. Overall, I would have appreciated more theorizing on the motivation of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, although this doc suggests that she is basically bananas.

I was struck by some of the similarities between this and an ostensibly very different documentary I recently watched, about the disastrous Fyre (music) Festival. In both cases, a young person managed to get older and supposedly wiser people to give them ridiculous amounts of money based purely on their chutzpah, while providing nothing in the way of oversight or verification in return. In both cases, everyone involved should have known better from the beginning.

I don't know the history of the production of this documentary, but there's a lot of very flattering footage of Holmes, so my guess is that at the heart of this, someone was working on a hagiography about her and then re-tasked the footage when things went South. This means you'll get your fill of her strange unblinking stare and weirdly affected voice.

I found very amusing that hordes of older men were quick to fawn over her (sometimes to an embarrassing degree) and support her financially, while the only person who didn't buy it was her female professor at Stanford. Is it possible these men maybe weren't thinking with their brains? I wonder (actually I don't).

Everyone compared her to Steve Jobs, and she consciously cultivated the image, but the thing everyone forgets is the Apple didn't involve any new or even challenging technology. No one doubted you could build a home computer. Jobs' genius was realizing people would *buy* one. In contrast, Holmes was claiming to have developed a revolutionary new technology that had eluded some of the biggest medical tech companies in the world, and everyone simply took her word for it with no evidence whatsoever. Imagine if instead of a computer, Jobs had claimed to have built a spaceship in his garage, and then rounded up investors without showing it to anyone. That's more like what Theranos was like.

The movie does a very good job of laying out the facts and the time line, but a central question remains unanswered; namely, when exactly did things go from "optimism" to "fraud"? Was it a scam from the beginning, or did she really think she could pull it off? Maybe that can't be answered by anyone but Holmes, and she's not saying. Even if you're very generous with your impression of her, the "adults" should have more realistic and looked out for things.

In the end, it's a cautionary tale from which I doubt anyone will learn anything.

Grateful to see this story told, but the documentary is unnecessarily long, repetitive, and overstylized to make up for it.

Having read the book, Bad Blood, written by the journalist who broke the Wall Street Journal story, and having been shocked and absolutely disgusted by Holmes and Sunny, I found this to be oddly lighthearted and unfocused. It skipped so much of what made the story truly horrifying and would have benefited from being extended in a format such as Wild Wild Country. Maybe not quite to that length, but a deeper look would have been so fascinating, especially with the addition of the film. I would still encourage you to view it, though, if you are not well read on the case. Not horrible, but I was disappointed.