The bubble and valuation? Thats not the real discussion here. The meltdown of a company that has no consumer product would never have drawn clicks. Fidelity could have marked it down 50 times and never made the news. There are tons of biotech startups with lofty valuations.
There was a consumer product. They performed thousands of blood tests, which were available in Palo Alto and Arizona.
But it's false that companies that don't have a consumer product don't draw intense interest. Ask Enron. Or WorldCom. Or Blackwater. Or Lehman Brothers. Or the folks behind the AOL and Time Warner merger
You have a point, but it operates under the assumption that there is an interest in disproving a role her gender had in the attention. An assumption I can't empirically prove, nor one you can empirically prove.
I would like to think the blood test product scandal was interesting on its own merits, amongst all of the other frauds going on in this country, but I don't think it really was elevated to the collective conscious because of that.
Holmes represents something inspirational to a marginalized demographic.
> but I don't think it really was elevated to the collective conscious because of that.
It was elevated because of the massive PR push by Theranos itself. I never even heard of Theranos until they did a massive PR push in 2013 or 2014. That, combined with the fact the company is valued at $9 billion, apparently has no actual working product and numerious other interesting facts about the company including it's well-connected-to-Gov (and large) [former?] Board of Directors, co-founder who committed suicide, at least two-large corporate partnerships that blew up (Safeway, Walgreens), etc., etc.
