The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing

It sure did. And it backfired in a way that could make future female innovators guilty by association. I can see investors asking themselves "That girl looks sharp, but is she another Elizabeth Holmes?"

Of all the ways Theranos was a scam, the gender thing was pretty much the last. She was wealthy, stacked the board with all the wrong sorts of people but the right sorts of people for corrupt contracts.

Reminiscent of what happened with Jason Arday[0].

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/08/04/the-bizarre-tale-o...

At the time women were (and still are) underdogs in STEM, so it's no surprise your professor would want to highlight that. For all the rest of were aware, she really was a successful health-tech founder

Have you ever wondered the same about other scams? Who else do you think was shaped "correctly"? Also, isn't affinity fraud most types of fraud?

I remember the endless glazing of Sam Bankman-Fried being pretty similar. Pretty sure they engineered it that way. Sell the idea of success. Trump did the exact same thing.

It's like reading the title of the post and skipping reading the actual post. She embodied a popular identity, offered a popularly STEMmy business plan, and the rest was skipped.

Word to wise entrepreneurs.

Somewhat relevant from The Economist.

> Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/09/03/woke-1-wa...

Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.

Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...

After the complete mind melting of 2 seasons of "the rehearsal", this was my exact path too

wait, it was actually her? I thought it was also some uncanny valley magic

Although I’m fully expecting actor shenanigans in the full documentary, I think the section in the trailer might actually be her for real

What an incredible trailer. So simple but so communicative and almost gave me goosebumps, very well made.

Seeing her like that gave me flashbacks to Mark Zuckerberg before he seemingly trained away that empty stare he and others share.

It's like a horror movie trailer, only scarier.

You mean marketing and engineering.

she'd be the perfect CEO of a BigAI corpo - as opposed to betting on humans randomly discovering new chemistry in predictable ammount of time, betting on neural networks offering a brute-force way to (super)human congnition is actualy "saner" - I mean, we know from _evolution_ that in a universe with out _physics_ brute forcing the problem of building intelligence with neural-network like architecture "very likely works"...

now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)

And yet somehow what she did still isn't as bad as what every private equity form on Wall Street gets away with daily.

There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?

Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm

How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice.

(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)

It does seem that way, half-way through they switch from "Billy" to "Bobby"

At least it's not opus level unreadable amirite?

In particular, season 2 is truly a work of art. As you said, it is just flat out brilliant. If you haven't watched the final episode of nathan for you (season 4 episode 7), watch it. it's equally fantastic.