The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) Online

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was very well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. This film which will premiere on HBO on March 18 is a remarkable and powerful story of Elizabeth Holmes remarkable fraudulent company, Theranos. A few years ago Holmes was being pitched as the next Steve Jobs; now her company is defunct and she is under indictment. Her company claimed to be inventing a device that could revolutionize the medical blood testing system, but their product was ultimately a complete fraud.

The film was directed by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney and is in some ways a sequel to his 2005 film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Both films capture the rise and fall of scam companies in a manner befitting Greek tragedy. Perhaps The Inventor proves that a woman con-artist can be just as corrupt as a male one. Holmes's product was bunk, but she was able to convince powerful and well-connected individuals that her non-existent product was actually about to revolutionize health care. Her business model appears to be as corrupt and deceptive as Donald Trump's. The film is demonstration that a good salesman can sell almost anything to a gullible audience. She was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to finance a product that didn't exist and was virtually physically impossible to achieve. Like all of Gibney's films, it is entrancing, and the two hour run-time flies right by. This is a fascinating film that not only tells the story of a corrupt company but actually capture many of the flaws of our modern business and political culture. Absolutely fascinating.