Elizabeth Holmes first appeared on a national news front page in a 2013 Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “A Drop of Blood, an Instant Diagnosis.” The article, written by Pulitzer‑winning editorial board member Joseph Rago, praised the idea of giving patients direct control over their health. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who sat on Theranos’s board, told Rago that Holmes could become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
By the following year Holmes was hailed as the youngest woman billionaire, and the mid‑2010s buzzed with stories of tech triumphs such as the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb and Twitter. As an editor at WIRED at the time, I saw Theranos as a perfect fit for the magazine that had first coined the “quantified self.” It seemed to prove that Silicon Valley’s approach to innovation could succeed in medicine, letting individuals manage their health with cutting‑edge technology and data.
Caitlin Roper, then a WIRED editor, sensed a story in Holmes and her company, but the shape of that story was unclear. The executive editor suggested she simply meet Holmes and see what emerged. The result was a long‑form Q&A titled “One Drop, Infinite Data: How Elizabeth Holmes Built a Better Blood Test,” which appeared in the March 2014 issue after the magazine’s usual production lag.
In the months that followed, the hype spread. Fortune placed Holmes on its cover, The New Yorker ran a profile, and Inc. featured her on its October 2015 cover, dubbing her “the next Steve Jobs.” A few weeks later, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published a modestly titled piece, “Theranos Has Struggled with Blood Tests.”
That article marked the beginning of the unraveling. The promised rapid blood tests were fabricated, the purported technology never existed, and Walgreens – a key partner – ended its agreement with Theranos. The scandal has since become the subject of a new documentary that follows Holmes in the weeks before her arrest.
When we gather former WIRED editors today, the conversation quickly turns to whether we helped elevate the worst excesses of the tech boom. Many of us recall that period as a time when every charismatic, billion‑dollar founder seemed destined for our pages. With Theranos back in the spotlight, our current leadership asked what we thought at the time.
I reached out to Caitlin Roper, now executive editorial director for film, TV and books at The New York Times. She remembered her initial draw to the story: “I was interested in a female founder who claimed she could disrupt health care, bring more transparency and lower costs. I was dealing with personal medical issues and regular blood tests, so I was curious about what this could do.”
Roper received permission to pursue the piece, though the exact format was still undecided. In our separate conversations she recalled my comment about the company’s board: “The board was completely out of the ordinary, filled with military leaders and government officials. It raised my suspicious hackles.”
A few of us had already noticed red flags. Theranos had not published any peer‑reviewed data, and rumors of internal misconduct floated around the office. That did not stop us from seeing a story; it simply meant we had to navigate it carefully. WIRED had a history of taking scientific claims at face value, but this story fit our focus on futuristic innovation.
Holmes agreed to meet, and Roper traveled to the company’s Palo Alto headquarters. She was only the second reporter ever allowed inside, and she observed Holmes’s carefully crafted persona. “She spoke in a low, strange voice and wore a black turtleneck, just like Steve Jobs,” Roper recalled. “She seemed intent on projecting a specific image.” (The Wall Street Journal later ran an illustrated caricature of Holmes, while WIRED published a professionally styled photograph of her in the same outfit.)
The interview lasted about an hour. Roper allowed Holmes to draw a tiny drop of blood from her fingertip and asked if she could follow the sample’s journey. The request was denied on “health‑and‑safety” grounds. Instead, Holmes escorted her to a Walgreens in Palo Alto, one of the few locations where Theranos claimed to have a lab. “That part felt like a snow job,” Roper said. “The booth was clearly not operational, even though Holmes told me the company planned to open many more Walgreens labs across the Southwest.”
When Roper received her test results, she noted that the panel matched one she had just undergone herself, which seemed reassuring at the time. How Theranos produced that result remains unclear, but later investigations revealed that the company operated a fully equipped laboratory in its Palo Alto office, not the advertised retail sites.