Amanda Seyfried stars as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s new original series, The Dropout.
Regular Ars readers have no doubt been following our ongoing coverage of the Elizabeth Holmes fraud trial. The disgraced Theranos founder’s meteoric rise and equally rapid fall has already been the subject of a 2018 nonfiction book and the HBO documentary feature, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Now Hulu has released the official trailer for The Dropout, the streaming platform’s new original limited series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes. (Kate McKinnon was originally slated to star but left the production early on for undisclosed reasons.)
It’s certainly one hell of a story. Holmes famously dropped out of Stanford (hence the series title) to found Theranos in 2003. The company claimed its technology was going to revolutionize medical diagnostic testing by reducing the amount of blood required for analysis down to a single finger prick. Based on that potential promise, Theranos raised over $900 million from investors, most of whom had no experience in biomedical startups. Forbes magazine named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the US in 2015, valuing Theranos at $9 billion.
Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: YouTube/Hulu)
As Ars’ Tim De Chant reported last month, Theranos could never deliver on its signature promise that it could perform more than 1,000 tests with a drop of blood. In reality, it could do 12. The company’s proprietary devices—first the Edison, then the MiniLab—were unreliable and had to be rigged with “null protocols” during investor demos to avoid raising red flags.
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