User reviews

I had read John Carreyrou's fine Wall Street Journal articles, as well as his thrilling book, Bad Blood, before seeing this documentary tonight. The first half of the documentary seems almost worshipful of Elizabeth Holmes, building up her mystique and putting her unique ability to attract doting followers to her message on display. Quite a lot of time is spent gazing into those big blue, unblinking eyes. By the time we get around to the cracks in the facade, we are more than an hour into the film. It is inevitable that a lot of important background was left out: the climate of constant firings that went on for years, the fact that Sunny and Elizabeth met when he was 38 (and married) and she was 19, that Elizabeth's dad had been a VP at Enron, etc. Mostly I would have appreciated a little more specific information on why the Edison machine failed. The examples given in the film don't seem that unsolvable, but I know from the book that there were some basic issues that simply couldn't be dreamed away owing to the tiny sample sizes from the finger pricks. Tyler Shultz comes off as a happy-go-lucky guy, but in fact he is one of the heroes of this story. It is not mentioned in this film, but not just his grandfather former Secretary of State and Theranos board member George Schultz, but also his parents flipped out when he told them he was quitting the company. His bravery in standing up for his values is truly admirable in one so young, especially considering the immense pressure he came under. To his parents' credit, they came around and ended up mortgaging their home to pay his legal bills. Ultimately, though, the story gets Elizabeth right: she is a zealot who is deaf to any naysayers, even to this day. The cautionary tale for the rest of us, is are we George Shultz or Tyler Shultz? Are we willing to see the truth and make a difficult decision, or are we too invested to be willing to give up on something we had believed in?

A very solid documentary, and one that hits close to home for me, so I really appreciated the depth Alex Gibney provided. I have to say first that Erika Cheung is a true hero and such an admirable person. She wanted to dream the dream but remained honest to the engineering and what the data was telling her. Tyler Schultz too. They are just kids really, and the pressure they faced was enormous, and interestingly enough Schultz's elderly grandfather George (former statesman) was a part of the problem. The documentary also shows us (yet again) the importance of a free press, and the interviews with the Wall Street Journal reporter (John Carreyrou) were one of my favorite parts, along with the commentary from behavioral scientist Dan Ariely. The footage that Gibney gets from company meetings is fantastic. I also loved the parallel he shows us to Thomas Edison, giving an example of a case in which the famous inventor followed the start-up mantra "fake it 'til you make it," as well as to other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, which puts this story in context as well as helps explain it.

Elizabeth Holmes was brilliant at selling investors and motivating her employees with the promise of a breakthrough in blood testing, but she was woefully incompetent at building an engineering team or listening to R&D inputs. What she failed to understand is that while you can be boldly aspirational and even attempt to emulate the approach of your idol (in her case, Steve Jobs) down to his look, at the end of the day it has to be grounded in some semblance of reality. For Jobs, setting aside his massive personal flaws, he always had the ability to balance both of these things, and he always had a strong counterpart, starting with Steve Wozniak early on. Where was Elizabeth Holmes's Woz? It's telling that other than a brilliant scientist/PhD from Cambridge who was marginalized when he started injecting unpleasant truth into the discussion (ultimately leading him to commit suicide), there is no mention or interview with a VP of R&D, or VP of Engineering here. Instead we see the President, and ex-Apple guy who was also her boyfriend, operating in the same smoke and mirrors sales act as her, as well as one of the company's creative marketing / brand types. There was never any "there" there, as they say, with the result being a constant game of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" that snowballed.

How Holmes was able to deceive a number of powerful, older men, and then leverage that to achieve great visibility, further investment, and the Walgreens deal is pretty shocking, even by Silicon Valley standards. I've lived in the Valley for some time, and have experience with start-ups, investors, and entrepreneurs. There is often a grand vision and the joke is like that old cartoon with the calculation at the blackboard, with the step drawn at an impossible leap labeled "then a miracle occurs." There is also always going to be investor money lost in a number of startups and that's just a part of the risk - but what makes this story reprehensible is that people's health was on the line. Perhaps one thing lacking in the documentary is an interview with people who were negatively impacted, such as one woman whose bogus test results indicated she had cancer.

The young employees at Theranos understood the human factor, with Tyler Schultz pointing out (perhaps a little too glibly) that with their 65% success rate at detecting syphilis, someone could think they were STD-free and spread the disease. Holmes never seems to get this, and to the bitter end she continues lying. I thought the documentary showed remarkable restraint in not drawing a conclusion, and even showed someone say that he thought she simply dreamed it so deeply that she didn't realize she was being deceptive. I don't buy that for a second. Aside from being an awful executive, she's an awful person, and to me comes across as a master manipulator and borderline sociopath, one cloaked in the altruistic goal of revolutionizing health care. In the end she's not stretching the truth with the aim of making this thing happen, she's lying to save her own skin. It's a chilling, chilling portrait.

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.

Like others, I followed the Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes story and in addition read the excellent book that investigative journalist John Carreyrou authored and published last year (Bad Blood).

It felt that the first part of this documentary was a hagiography rather than an incisive investigative documentary - the focus on the "female Steve Jobs" perspective dominated and she certainly seemed to have the same "reality distortion field" powers he had. However, having read the book my perspective was that she, and her boyfriend/COO Sunny Balwani were bullies (via lawyer David Boies, security guards and others) to their staff , associates and others and who benefited by manipulating otherwise smart, powerful people and taking advantage of their wishful thinking. Eventually the documentary got to the reality but it felt like a long time and frankly I found some of the interviews (eg with the respected behavioral economist Dan Ariely) to be somewhat ethereal and did not add value to the story.

I have been around start-ups and understand the notion of "faking it a bit" to get to the final "vision". However, to compare her to an Edison, a Jobs or a Musk was inappropriate. in terms of her ability to manipulate, tell brazen lies and intimidate I feel a much more appropriate comparison would have been Bernie Madoff.

This would have been much better without Dan Ariely's commentary - he really didn't offer much of an explanation of what happened in this case. It would have been much more revealing to have a psychologist talk about her psychopathy. I don't believe at all that she was well-intentioned but just got caught up in momentum, I think she was selfishly-motivated and calculating all along with no thought or care for the impact on patients.

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.

Currently airing on HBO, this film by master documentarian Alex Gibney (The Armstrong Lie/Taxi to the Dark Side) explores the pervasive 'fake it till you make it' ethos which much of the dotcom enterprises have undertaken in order to gain funding for their big idea even though sometimes, as in this doc's case, there is no product delivered at the end of the day. Elizabeth Holmes wanted to create a revolutionary device which by using a person's blood (from a finger prick) could examine & determine any maladies or characteristics for medical use at a fraction of what the big labs charge today. Not having any successfully manufactured tangible device to use, the results of the initial tests performed on patients were skewed & problematic even though Walgreen's had bought into their new tech setting up wellness centers in Arizona before rolling them out nationwide. Aligning herself w/big money & hopeful investors, Holmes, along w/her partner & significant other, continued to ratchet up the success of their non-existent product to the public much to the chagrin of employees who knew the truth all along & eventually whistleblowed the entire scheme to the press. A worthy case of believing in the product rather than the producer is made when we see avarice & arrogance go hand in hand to a potentially devastating result.

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.

"The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley" (2019 release; 120 min.) is a documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her biotech company Theranos. As the movie opens, we are in 2014, at the peak of the company's might and moving into spectacular new headquarters in Palo Alto. The voice over informs us that "within 4 years, the company would go from being valued at $10 billion to less than zero. This is a cautionary tale." We then are introduced to Holmes' background, what an over-achiever she always was, and eventually leading her to drop out of Stanford at age 20, and instead use the tuition money as seed money for Theranos, which Holmes envisioned as providing low-cost access to blood testing. As the company grow, staff is enthused, female employees see Holmes as a hero, and publications like Fortune and inc. provide glowing coverage. But the company isn struggling with he manufacture of its Edison testing kit... At this point we're 15 min. into the movie, and you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the latest documentary from Alex Gibney, whose 2013 "The Armstrong Lie" is just one of his many outstanding films. Here he looks at Holmes and Theranos. Can the two be separated? It'd be difficult to do so, as it almost feels like Holmes built a cult of personality within Theranos. When a company grows so spectacularly and then implodes with an even greater bang, it always makes for fascinating viewing/reading/studying. Gibney seems to have gone all out in interviewing the relevant characters, including journalists and ex-employees. And then there is former Secretary George Schultz, now in his 90s, and still going strong. He introduces Holmes to his grandson, who ends up working at Theranos and see it all go wrong. Wow. The movie also benefits from the inclusion of the interview of a behavioral economist, who puts it all into context. At the beginning we are told this is a cautionary tale, and that it certainly is, but it's a lot more than just that.

"The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley" recently premiered on HBO and I finally watched it on demand the other night. I have a soft sport for non-fiction in general, including in films and in books. As soon as I saw the name Alex Gibney associated with this, I was pretty sure that this would be worth checking out, and I was right. If you love documentaries, I'd readily suggest you check it out, be it on VOD or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray, and draw your own conclusion.

Until I saw this film, I had never heard of Theranos nor Elizabeth Holmes. However, after seeing it, the documentary left me feeling a bit angry....and happy I saw it.

The film is the story of a company and its founder who claimed they could make a small, portable sized machine to test minute bits of blood for over 200 different ailments. The problem was that such technology, at least at this time, simply isn't possible and the film tells how the charismatic CEO ignored this and pushed forward...bilking investors and the public who used these machines.

The film is unusual in that instead of just talking about Ms. Holmes, they had LOTS of footage of her....so it isn't like they are talking about her but have her own words. Additionally, many other folks were interviewed and they used a lot of footage of interviews made prior to the film itself. Because of this, it seems reasonably accurate and thorough. All in all, an eye-opening and most unusual film...one well worth seeing.

Did she really think that she could get away with it? That's what you would ask yourself, if you are scamming investors of millions upon millions of money. And not just ordinary investors but moneyed people of the highest kind! Apparently, family connections and influence plays a big part in her successful recruitment of the filthy rich to join her revolutionary invention of the century. And as they say in Silicon Valley "fake it till you make it" did'nt come true. It's a shame really, her idea, is trully remarkable. They just really was'nt able to make it a reality. Maybe in some near future. But not now.

The content is so interesting that I wish the filmmakers didn't go in such a stylistic direction. I wish there were more information jam packed in here. Still, fascinating documentary.

What do you think would happen if the average Joe robbed and lied to the tune of 9 billion dollars?

This doc really peed me off I was expecting more details than the podcast, but it seems like the directors were bending over backwards to make excuses. Honestly, she's a monster and she's probably gonna get away with it.

I liked seeing her in her element and the footage is great. Excerpts of interviews and photoshoots, it's obvious she's seriously in love with herself. The story is fascinating.

Well, there's a bit of everything in here. Sociopathy, fraud, scam, crazy people, feudal history, gaslighting, crazy people, voice changing robots and a company built on unscientific and disprovable facts that somehow received government funding and the support of politically influential people who shouldn't really deal with politics, let alone science. It's the definitive parody of today's societal acceptance of said is better than done where governments and whole industries are built on top of faith and trust, and when everything collapses, the scapegoat pays for most of it (rightly so in this case), the public plugs the money leak and the enablers get a free pardon ticket. It's almost funny in its absurdity. Also quite sad in its reality. Interesting enough to be enjoyed. Technically passable. Overall a bit repetitive and flat.

A reality of life is that the average layman must rely on "techies" with specialized knowledge to translate the world of technology for them. Therein lies the potential for falsification and for the laymen to not know there's any problem.

That said, it's still amazing in this day and age, a female in her early twenties can fabricate the existence of a technology and get away with it for so long.

Amazingly, she was able to build a multi-billion dollar company, partner with Walgreens, get appointed a fellow of Harvard Medical School and for pass the scrutiny of investors and journalists worldwide ... for over a decade. Everything was based on non-existent technology.

As someone in this documentary indicates "she was a zealot and a zealot is such a believer in what they're doing that they're blind to the reality of what's happening."

This movie is a wake-up call to investors and stakeholders for the need of greater transparency in technology companies. Be suspicious of demos done "in-house", of delivery dates that keep getting pushed back and of a founder that seems infallible because of universal acclaim.

The Inventor suffers from having been beaten to the punch many times over. By the time this documentary was released, most of us knew the story, having seen multiple mini-documentaries on YouTube and from news outlets. The Inventor adds nothing new, and the result is a film that seems redundant and slow-paced.

What an incredible documentary. You don't need to be interested in analysing blood or investing in high risk companies to enjoy this, but I will always remember words from my grandfather. He refers to events, speeches, excuses etc etc as "smoke and mirrors" and one has to question when a persons solution to a double chin is to wear a polo neck jumper how on earth can they be seen as being qualified even capable of carrying out such a bird brained idea. At the end there was a message stating that she and her partner in crime had been found guilty of the scam and the theft of $900 million, but nothing about whether they had been stripped of their personal wealth creamed by way of the scam. Even better it would also include a prison sentence which might act as a deterrent to the next get rich quick scam artist. 8/10

The documentary was great. It's just the finicky provider/ distribution/subscription limitations that got me shaking my head. I subscribed to HBONOW through FireTV. I downloaded the HBONOW app on my iPhone. I cannot sign in to the HBONOW app on my iPhone unless I subscribe to HBONOW through iTunes, so I can't watch the movie on my Apple device. Petty

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was very well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. This film which will premiere on HBO on March 18 is a remarkable and powerful story of Elizabeth Holmes remarkable fraudulent company, Theranos. A few years ago Holmes was being pitched as the next Steve Jobs; now her company is defunct and she is under indictment. Her company claimed to be inventing a device that could revolutionize the medical blood testing system, but their product was ultimately a complete fraud.

The film was directed by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney and is in some ways a sequel to his 2005 film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Both films capture the rise and fall of scam companies in a manner befitting Greek tragedy. Perhaps The Inventor proves that a woman con-artist can be just as corrupt as a male one. Holmes's product was bunk, but she was able to convince powerful and well-connected individuals that her non-existent product was actually about to revolutionize health care. Her business model appears to be as corrupt and deceptive as Donald Trump's. The film is demonstration that a good salesman can sell almost anything to a gullible audience. She was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to finance a product that didn't exist and was virtually physically impossible to achieve. Like all of Gibney's films, it is entrancing, and the two hour run-time flies right by. This is a fascinating film that not only tells the story of a corrupt company but actually capture many of the flaws of our modern business and political culture. Absolutely fascinating.

Recent documentary movies have really taken off from mostly indie to mainstream movie quality and filming, this is not one of those. As for Elizabeth - a white woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, Stanford on the resume and wealthy family - her journey to becoming a 'on-paper' billionaire wasn't that hard. Valuations and Silicon Valley is another story.

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.

Dan Ariely himself explaining some of our behaviors it's amazing and add so much sustain to the content. Love it.

Even though it's a case of reality, I didn't want to spoil if you haven't heard of this lunatic (Elizabeth)