It’s a good show that takes its time in places, though it feels somewhat rushed toward the end. Still, it is well produced and competently made.

The Story of The Dropout

The series tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes fooling the world—and herself—into believing she was the female version of Steve Jobs. Everyone went along with it: investors, the media, politicians. They desperately wanted to believe in the feminist narrative that women can do it all.

The show doesn’t explore this in great depth; it even repeatedly frames Holmes’ downfall as an inversion of the true reality. At one point, a character says something along the lines of: “When she finally fails, it will be the biggest blow to all the good female entrepreneurs out there.” The underlying message seems to be that the patriarchy is still out there, waiting to tear women down.

What the show never really addresses is that Holmes only rose to fame because she was a woman.

The supposedly patriarchal Western world wanted a female CEO superstar. Politicians helped. Investors helped. The media helped. Everyone played a role in turning every lie she told into an accepted truth—until it inevitably collapsed and reality exposed the fraud.

Ironically, it was mostly men—the so-called patriarchy—who made Holmes famous. The role of politics is only briefly touched upon, but figures like Henry Kissinger were on Theranos’ board of directors very early on, providing political connections and access to funding. The media is portrayed as the force that ultimately unmasked Holmes and revealed the truth, yet it was the same media that aggressively promoted her and Theranos in the early days as a young female genius. She fit the feminist rhetoric perfectly and satisfied the desire for a female icon in the tech CEO space.

The Story of Theranos

In the end, Theranos was the story of a woman and an Indian man scamming Western elites by exploiting leftist virtue signaling. The company was marketed as a force for good—helping the poor and the sick, fighting evil capitalist corporations at the top of the industry with revolutionary innovation, all while claiming to make the world a better place.

Add a female CEO to win over feminists. Add an Indian man behind the scenes who actually ran things, and you get the multicultural angle as well.

It was a socialist-leftist wet dream. Theranos received endless benefit of the doubt until the scam became impossible to ignore.

It is said that investors lost more than $900 million. One can’t help but wonder how much taxpayer money was also poured into this black hole.

Conclusion

The Dropout is a good watch—one that is likely to make your blood boil. It doesn’t cover all the factors involved, particularly the political networks that enabled Theranos’ rise, but it succeeds as an interesting character study: of a woman who eventually believed her own lies, and of a liberal bubble caught in the web she and her Indian handler spun.