A new WIRED retrospective, written by a former editor, revisits how the magazine and the wider press helped build Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos before the company collapsed into scandal. The piece recounts how Theranos first reached a national audience through a 2013 Wall Street Journal opinion column that praised Holmes as the next Steve Jobs, setting the stage for her rise to billionaire status by 2014.
Caitlin Roper, the WIRED editor who interviewed Holmes for an influential Q&A in March 2014, later told the author that she noticed red flags at the time. Those included a board made up of military and government figures that seemed odd, a lack of peer-reviewed data, and unconfirmable rumors about the company's operations. Despite those signals, she proceeded with the story, treating Theranos as a futuristic innovation rather than a subject for skeptical investigation.
The retrospective notes that other outlets, including Fortune, The New Yorker, and Inc., followed with favorable coverage. Only when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published his investigation in October 2015 did the truth emerge: the speedy blood tests were fake and Theranos had misled its partners. The piece ends with WIRED's editors asking whether they, and the wider tech media, enabled the hype that allowed the company to deceive so many people for so long. With just one source available, the article presents this account without independent confirmation.