Elizabeth Holmes is in prison, but the Theranos playbook she embodied — promise the impossible first and let the truth catch up later — has become standard practice in Silicon Valley.
Last Thursday, Elon Musk unveiled the new Roadster in Texas. The car climbed half a roller-coaster loop, hung upside down for a moment, then flipped and landed.
Show them first, let belief follow
Ten air thrusters did the work. Musk said this would be a real car on real roads.
But it won't be in production until at least 2028, carries 600 litres of compressed air, is sold invite-only and will likely cost an astronomical sum.
He wasn't lying. He was asking people to take his promise on faith.
Less than 48 hours later, the documentary You Can See Everything opened. Its subject is Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, convicted of fraud.
In one scene she and her husband try to build Theranos 2.0. Asked why she is starting a company in her last days with her family, she says this is what she is meant to be doing on Earth.
She is not the aberration. The era is.
Holmes never built the machine. She described a product that didn't exist and lied about the finances.
The problem is that Silicon Valley now treats the founder as the product: ideas, charisma and salesmanship matter more than whether anything was made.
Venture capital bets so early that products are still hypothetical. Faking it until you make it becomes the house rule.
Crypto, NFTs, the metaverse — billions went in, one wave after another. Now it is AI, and the taunt has shifted from 'have fun staying poor' to 'you'll be left behind for good'.
An Anthropic co-founder said U.S. GDP could jump from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion in four years, based on nothing but the most extreme setting of his company's own model.
Musk said SpaceX could one day be worth orders of magnitude more than the entire Earth economy.
Nobody is outraged anymore
If Theranos collapsed today, Silicon Valley might rally around Holmes and say she was simply too early.
Trust in the press is lower than in 2015, X belongs to Musk, and a whole ecosystem of industry-friendly podcasts would carry her story.
One investor has already said on air that within ten years a blood-testing product will appear and prove Holmes was just 20 years ahead of her time.
In Silicon Valley the builder is never wrong. They are just early. The future is coming. Just have faith.
Why it matters
Telling a fraud from a visionary is getting harder, because the visionary's claim may only be 'not yet.' When the industry defaults to promising first and delivering later, the rest of us lose the ability to judge from a launch demo whether a thing exists at all.
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