Nina Metz: ‘The Dropout,’ Elizabeth Holmes and Hollywood’s scammer fixation
“The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried on Hulu is a retelling of the wildly dishonest rise and eventual, if belated, fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her biotech firm Theranos. In short: Theranos raised billions on the promise that it could build a small, portable device that would change medicine forever by generating a vast array of test results from just a single drop of blood. Despite big-named investors who gave this swindle the stamp of legitimacy, none of it was true.
It is a story already explored, in considerable depth, in the nonfiction book expose “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” director Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” and a podcast also called “The Dropout.” Of those projects and
