A flagship fraud of the era succeeded by sheer assertion, not clever scheme

Evidence

By 2013, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes the youngest self-made billionaire woman of her time. With this achievement, she embodied the era’s obsession with entrepreneurial heroism. Theranos also represented an additional key aspect of the zeitgeist: It was a complete fraud. And it wasn’t even a clever fraud. There were no elaborate financial maneuvers or schemes to weave around regulatory loopholes—she simply claimed that her technology worked, and it didn’t. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 568

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘un- clever fraud’ observation — fraud so naked it succeeded by cultural permission — could anchor a piece connecting the omnivore monoculture’s appetite for entrepreneurial narrative to the simultaneous golden age of fraud: both rest on story over scrutiny.