Why Are We All So Bloody Obsessed With Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos Scandal?

It began last year with Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou’s explosive book, Bad Blood—the definitive deep dive into the Theranos scandal and its mastermind, Elizabeth Holmes. “I binged it on Audible in 18 hours flat,” a friend told me. It continued with the ABC News podcast The Dropout, the culmination of a three-year investigation that unearthed never-before-aired deposition tapes of Holmes and her alleged partner in crime, Sunny Balwani, telling the story in dramatic audio form. On Monday night, a new HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, joined the Holmes/Theranos media boom, immediately trending on Twitter.

“This is my Super Bowl,” tweeted Random House social media manager Sophie Vershbow of the documentary. Photos of her personal viewing party included a plate of sugar cookies shaped like black turtlenecks, an ode to Holmes’s (and Steve Jobs’s) signature look.

This level of passionate stan response is typically reserved for awards shows and Bachelorette episodes, not documentaries about Silicon Valley blood-testing startups. Even in a grim era of grifters—from the Fyre Festival to New York art world scammer Anna Delvey to Operation Varsity Blues—there is a distinct, undying thirst for Holmes/Theranos content.

“I read Bad Blood in one sitting and have not been able to get enough of the Theranos story since,” Maura Walters, a journalist who has documented her obsession with the case on her weekly newsletter, From Maura, told Vogue. “I devoured The Dropout, naturally . . . and I cannot wait for the HBO documentary. Give me all the skullduggery.”

Walters is among the mob of morbidly fascinated “fans” who read the book, listened to the podcast, fiended for the documentary, and lost workday productivity last month when Vanity Fair revealed that even as Holmes stood charged of 11 felonies, accused of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, she was pictured smiling brightly—and dressed up in cheeky purple wigs—on her fiancé’s social media accounts. Excitement can’t run too high for the forthcoming feature-film version (the script is in the works) to be directed by Vice and The Big Short’s Adam McKay, with Jennifer Lawrence currently attached to play Holmes.

“I will read everything/watch everything/listen to every podcast/eavesdrop on every conversation in every coffee shop about how those little blood amulets were made of cheap glass and jazz hands,” writer Rachel Syme has tweeted. “I just wanna talk about the horrifying scam that was Theranos all the time is that weird,” Sarah Lerner, cohost of the Hellbent podcast, similarly quipped.

The mania hasn’t escaped Carreyrou’s attention. “For one thing, the book sales have been unbelievable,” the author told Vogue by phone, saying Bad Blood has sold more than 500,000 copies combined in the U.S. and U.K. “There seems to be an insatiable appetite.”

So why are we so (forgive us) bloody obsessed? Silicon Valley intrigue—the kind that has surrounded Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg—plays a part, according to Rebecca Jarvis, The Dropout host and ABC News’s chief business, technology, and economics correspondent. “It really taps into a number of themes in this moment: truth, ambition, elitism, the ‘fake it until you make it’ ethos of Silicon Valley, and why some people are afforded every opportunity while others can barely tap into the system.”

The Theranos scheme seemed particularly egregious, with the startup claiming to take rapid-result blood tests with just a prick of a fingertip—but using technology that never quite worked and in some cases delivered false results that left patients worried their lives could be in jeopardy. Holmes “gambled in a very cavalier way with the public health,” Carreyrou said. By comparison, it makes Fyre Festival’s infamous cheese sandwiches seem trivial.

But Holmes’s gender also likely looms large in the enduring pop cultural preoccupation with Theranos. In fact, “I think the chief reason people are so fascinated is that the main character . . . is a woman, and a young woman at that, in a world dominated by men,” Carreyrou said. “She was going to be the first female to succeed on the scale of Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. When it turned out she was a fraud, it threw people for a loop and pulled them down the rabbit hole.”

Walters agrees that the idea of Holmes—once a bona fide media darling—as a rare woman startup founder in the Silicon Valley boys’ club “only made me more captivated and, frankly, let down by her downfall. I think we all wanted to believe in the bold, driven female in the male-dominated room, despite her inexperience and myriad red flags.” For Jarvis, Theranos “raises a lot of questions about us.” As she says in episode six of The Dropout, “there’s not an Elizabeth Holmes without all of us buying into the idea.”

Further fueling the Theranos and Holmes interest is a lingering mystery: What, exactly, were Holmes’s true motivations? “What was going through [Holmes’s] head fascinated me to no end,” Carreyrou said. “Is she completely delusional? Is she just a bald-faced liar and psychopath? Or is it a mixture of the two?” Carreyrou—whose initial Wall Street Journal investigation inspired chants of “Fuck you, Carreyrou” at Theranos headquarters—says he believes Holmes “started out with good intentions, but along the way she cut corners and she started telling lies, and those lies snowballed.”

The next chapter for the cult of Holmes/Theranos compulsion—nope, it’s not over yet—is shaping up to be a gripping, all-too-real drama: Holmes and Balwani’s criminal trial, for which a status hearing is scheduled for April 22 in a San Francisco court. Carreyrou will be covering it for the WSJ; Jarvis promises The Dropout will “very likely be back with more”; and Walters will continue documenting her thirst for Theranos dirt in her From Maura newsletter.

“My newsletter primarily covers books, beauty, and fashion, but any mention of Elizabeth Holmes gets exactly triple the clicks of, say, a lipstick or novel I write about,” she said. ”I’ll obviously be watching this trial with an O.J.-like obsession.”