In his new documentary about the fall of Theranos and its media-savvy CEO Elizabeth Holmes, director Alex Gibney had to wrestle with a question of motivation: Why did Holmes keep the charade going for so long?
“I don’t think it was outright greed,” Gibney said on the latest episode of Recode Media. “I don’t think she’s Bernie Madoff. I think she believed in the mission. I also think she believed in the idea of who she was, right? But sometimes, that’s not the good news, it’s actually the bad news, because it’s a variation of the end justifies the means, right?”
He recounted to Recode’s Peter Kafka how Holmes and her deputies intentionally shaped Theranos’ public image to be Apple-esque, even bringing in famed documentarian Errol Morris to film Holmes — just as he had done with her idol, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But Gibney thinks the altruistic vision of the company’s infamously fictitious blood-testing technology is the real trick that helped Holmes…
