The Epic Rise and Fall of Elizabeth Holmes
“女版乔布斯”的覆灭：硅谷创业神话时代终结

SAN FRANCISCO — Near the end of Elizabeth Holmes’s criminal trial, her lawyers submitted into evidence her punishing self-improvement plan.

旧金山——在伊丽莎白·霍姆斯的刑事审判接近尾声时，她的律师将她那残酷的自我提升计划作为证据提交了上去。

“4 a.m. Rise and thank God,” the handwritten memo began. Exercise, meditation, prayer, breakfast (whey and, as she spelled it, “bannanna”) followed. By 6:45 a.m., a time when slackers were still fumbling for the alarm clock, she was at the office of Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003.

手写的备忘录从“凌晨4点，起床并感谢上帝”开始。运动、冥想、祈祷，早餐紧随其后（乳清和香蕉，她拼写的是“bannanna”）。早上6点45分，当懒散的人还在伸手摸索着闹钟，她已经到达Theranos门口。这是她在2003年创立的血液检测公司。
 

十年来，霍姆斯愚弄了精明的投资者、数百名聪明的员工、全明星董事会和渴望发掘新星的媒体。

Ms. Holmes had many rules at Theranos: “I am never a minute late. I show no excitement. ALL ABOUT BUSINESS. I am not impulsive. I know the outcome of every encounter. I do not hesitate. I constantly make decisions and change them as needed. I speak rarely. I call bullshit immediately.”

在Theranos，霍姆斯给自己定下很多规则：“我从不迟到一分钟。我不会表现出兴奋。一切都是为了工作。我不冲动。我知道每一次交手的结果。我毫不犹豫。我不断地做出决定并根据需要改变它们。我很少说话。遇到忽悠我会当场揭穿。”

It worked. Ms. Holmes’s resolve was so forceful, and fit so neatly into the Silicon Valley cliché of achieving the impossible by refusing to admit it was impossible, that it inspired belief right up to the moment on Monday when a jury officially convicted her of four counts of fraud.

这很有效。霍姆斯的决心十分强大，非常符合硅谷的套路，即为了实现不可能之事而拒绝承认它不可能，激发着人们的信念——直到周一陪审团正式判定她犯有四项欺诈罪名。

The verdict signaled the end of an era. In Silicon Valley, where the line between talk and achievement is often vague, there is finally a limit to faking it.

这一判决标志着一个时代的结束。在硅谷，侃侃而谈和成就之间的界线往往很模糊，作假终于到头了。

From Stanford University dropout to Theranos’s $9 billion valuation to conviction, it is an epic rise and fall that will be chewed over in the coffee shops and juice bars of Palo Alto, Calif., until the tech industry departs for a new life in Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ off-world colonies. For a decade, Ms. Holmes fooled savvy investors, hundreds of smart employees, an all-star board and a media eager to anoint a new star even, or especially, if she had no qualifications.

从自斯坦福大学辍学，到Theranos的90亿美元估值再到被定罪，这场史诗般的兴衰将在加州帕洛阿尔托的咖啡馆和果汁吧成为谈资，直到科技行业启程前往埃隆·马斯克和杰夫·贝索斯开启的异世界殖民地新生活。十年来，霍姆斯愚弄了精明的投资者、数百名聪明的员工、全明星董事会和渴望发掘新星的媒体，尽管她并没有那个资质。

Just as Silicon Valley is a cartoonish version of American notions about the virtues of hard work and getting rich quick, so Ms. Holmes was a heightened version of Silicon Valley.

如果说硅谷是美国理念——勤劳工作的美德以及快速致富——的卡通化版本，霍姆斯便是硅谷的加强版。

As her self-improvement scheme made clear, she was trying to turn herself into a machine that had no time for anything but work. This was not for her own benefit, of course, but humanity’s. She perfectly encapsulated the Silicon Valley credo that tech was here to serve us, and never mind exactly how it did it, the billions it was making or whether it even worked.

正如她的自我提升计划所表明的那样，她试图将自己变成一台除了工作之外没有时间做任何事情的机器。这当然不是为了她自己的利益，而是为了人类。她完美地概括了硅谷的信条，即科技是为我们服务的，不管是怎么做到的，不管它是怎么创造了数十亿美元的，甚至不管它是否有用。

Whenever anyone — a regulator, an investor, a reporter — wanted to know a little more about exactly how the Theranos machines functioned, the company cried “trade secrets.” The real secret, of course, was that Theranos didn’t have any trade secrets because its machines didn’t work. But her answer worked for a long time.

每当有人——监管者、投资者、记者——想更多地了解Theranos机器的运作方式时，该公司都会唤出“商业机密”的借口。当然，真正的秘密是，Theranos没有任何商业机密，因为它的机器不管用。但她的回答管用了很长时间。

Hiding fraud behind the imperatives of secrecy wasn’t the only way Ms. Holmes’s actions were rooted in tradition. Her self-improvement plan dated back to Ben Franklin but found its most indelible expression in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation of Jay Gatsby, the mysterious, alluring, handsome millionaire who also ran a few swindles.

霍姆斯的行为植根于传统，而将欺诈行为隐藏在保密的必要性背后并不是的唯一方式。她的自我提升计划可以追溯到本·富兰克林，但在F·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德创作的人物杰伊·盖茨比身上找到了最深刻的表达，这位神秘、迷人、英俊的百万富翁也经营过一些骗局。

Gatsby was practically Ms. Holmes’s brother. He, too, got where he was with a schedule and rules, in his case written inside a book when he was a striving youth:

盖茨比几乎可以称得上是霍姆斯的兄弟。他也有自己的时间表和规则，他年轻时写在书里的是：

5 p.m.-6 p.m.: Practice elocution, poise and how to obtain it

下午5点至6点：练习口才、仪态以及如何做到泰然自如

7 p.m.-9 p.m.: Study needed inventions

晚7点至9点：研究必要的发明

The parallels with Ms. Holmes extended even to Gatsby’s equally loose grasp of spelling. “No more smokeing or chewing,” he admonished himself.

与霍姆斯的相似之处甚至延伸到盖茨比漫不经心的拼写上。“不要再抽烟（抽烟拼写为smokeing）或嚼烟了，”他告诫自己。

Gatsby was a bootlegger but also used Wall Street to cheat. He sold fake bonds. Ms. Holmes chose Silicon Valley, the last and greatest of all human dreams. In the first decade of the century, it promised to reinvent transportation, friendship, commerce, politics, money.

盖茨比是个走私贩，但也利用华尔街作弊。他卖过假债券。霍姆斯选择了硅谷，这是人类最后的也是最伟大的梦想。在本世纪的第一个十年，它承诺重塑交通、友谊、商业、政治和金钱。

Blood-testing must have seemed like a breeze by comparison, especially since Ms. Holmes was a natural salesperson, as good at bending reality as Steve Jobs himself. Here she was in an interview with the radio show Tech Nation in 2005, explaining what Theranos was all about:

相比之下，血液检测肯定看上去轻而易举，尤其是当霍姆斯是天生的推销员，和史蒂夫·乔布斯本人一样善于扭曲现实。2005年，她在接受电台节目TechNation的采访时，解释了Theranos在做的一切：

“We focused on creating a customized medicine tool that could be used in the home by every patient, so that every day, a patient can get real-time analysis of their blood samples.”

“我们专注于创建一种定制的医疗工具，每个患者都可以在家中使用，这样患者每天都可以实时分析他们的血液样本。”

Who could not applaud such an invention? Theranos was making a messy, uncertain and time-consuming medical process into something effortless and painless. “A little teeny needle that pulls a little teeny drop of blood,” she said. Software would do the rest.

谁能不为这样的发明鼓掌呢？Theranos正在将一个混乱、不确定和耗时的医疗过程变得轻松无痛。“一根细小的针头，抽出一点点血，”她说。剩下的工作将交给软件完成。

Tech Nation’s host, Moira Gunn, has a master’s degree in computer science and a doctor of philosophy in mechanical engineering, but she was dazzled. “How old are you, Elizabeth?” she asked.

TechNation的主持人莫伊拉·古恩拥有计算机科学硕士学位和机械工程哲学博士学位，但她对此惊叹不已。“你多大了，伊丽莎白？”她问。

“I’m 21,” Ms. Holmes said.

“我21岁，”霍姆斯说。

Her age was brought up not to knock down her claims but to underline how impressive they were. “I’m gonna go tell my two children, they better get off their duffs,” Ms. Gunn exclaimed.

她的年龄之所以被提及，不是为了质疑她的说法，而是为了强调这些说法是多么令人赞叹。“我要去告诉我的两个小孩，他们最好别再懒散下去了，”古恩嚷道。

Ms. Holmes said Theranos’s device was in “the production phase.” She added, “We hope to release it, actually, to a pharmaceutical partner around mid-to-late this year.” Thirteen years later, when the company dissolved, it had never successfully released a device.

霍姆斯称，Theranos的设备正处于“生产阶段”。她还说，“实际上，我们希望在今年中下旬就向一家制药合作方推出该产品。”13年过去了，这家公司到解散之时也从未成功推出过任何一台设备。

In 2005, however, even reinventing blood-testing at 21 was not enough, so deep were our expectations of genius. Ms. Holmes was asked about her future, and gave the stock Silicon Valley response: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

然而在2005年，即便在21岁彻底改写血液检测方法仍然不够夸张，我们对天才的期待实在太多了。当被问及她的未来，霍姆斯给出了现成的硅谷式答案：厉害的还在后头呢。

Theranos already had the “next generations” of its device in prototype, she said. It was miniaturized to make it even faster, to make it “more high-throughput.” It would be automated: “You don’t even have to touch your finger on the device.”

她说，Theranos已经设计出了“下一代”设备的原型机。设备体积变小，让运行速度变得更快，“高通量（筛选）能力更强”。它将实现自动化：“你甚至无需用手指触摸设备。”

So in one of the first media interviews Ms. Holmes ever did, she said Theranos had a working device that would be able to analyze your health without actually touching you. No one called her on it. No wonder she and her deputy and boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer who was known as “Sunny,” thought they could brazen it out in the Silicon Valley tradition until they had something that actually worked.

因此，在霍姆斯发际之初的一次媒体采访中，她说Theranos的高效设备可以在不接触人体的情况下分析人体健康情况。没有人对她的说法提出质疑。难怪她和她的副手兼男友拉梅什·巴尔万尼——也就是该公司人称“桑尼”的首席运营官——会觉得，他们可以在硅谷传统中厚着脸皮撑下去，一直撑到他们造出真正有用的东西。

This is a credulous age. William Perry, a Theranos board member, was secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, a mathematician, engineer and Stanford professor. Not, in other words, a fool with regard to Silicon Valley. Yet he told The New Yorker in 2014 that Ms. Holmes “has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison. She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”

这是一个易于轻信的时代。威廉·佩里曾在克林顿总统手下担任国防部长，这位数学家、工程师兼斯坦福教授也是Theranos董事会成员。换句话说，他不是个硅谷小白。然而，他在2014年接受《纽约客》采访时表示，霍姆斯“有时被称为另一个史蒂夫·乔布斯，但我认为这种比较并不恰当。她具备了史蒂夫从未有过的社会意识。他是个天才；而她则是心怀天下的天才”。

Mr. Perry declined to comment.

佩里对此拒绝置评。

Mr. Jobs, who died in 2011, might as well have been a recruiter for Theranos. Adam Rosendorff, a lab director at Theranos, testified during Ms. Holmes’s trial that he thought the company was going to be “the next Apple.” He applied for the job after reading a biography of the Apple co-founder.

于2011年去世的乔布斯或许可算是Theranos的招聘员了。Theranos的实验室主任亚当·罗森多夫在霍姆斯庭审中作证称，他以为这家公司会是“下一个苹果”。他在阅读了这位苹果联合创始人的传记后才申请了该公司的职位。

“The whole excitement around Steve Jobs was very compelling to me,” he said. “I wanted to make a more global impact on health care and I thought that joining a diagnostics company would help me do that.”

“对我而言，围绕在史蒂夫·乔布斯身边的所有激动之情都极具吸引力，”他说。“我想在医疗保健领域创造更大的全球影响力，我觉得加入一家诊疗公司会帮我实现这一点。”

Mr. Rosendorff grew disillusioned before Theranos’s misleading claims were exposed, but Mr. Perry stuck it out until December 2016, when the start-up was forced to change its board in a futile attempt to survive.

在Theranos的误导性主张尚未被揭发之时，罗森多夫的幻想就逐渐破灭了，但佩里坚持到2016年12月，当时这家初创企业被迫更换了董事会成员，那是一次徒劳无功的求生之举。

With believers like these, Ms. Holmes’s dream must have seemed so close that she could hardly fail to grasp it. A couple more late nights from the engineering team, a few more magazine covers declaring her a genius, and it would be as good as done.

有这样的信徒，霍姆斯的梦想似乎近在咫尺，不可能抓不住。如果工程团队再多熬几个晚上，如果宣布她是天才的杂志封面再多一些，那梦想就差不多等于实现了。

So where does this conviction leave the rest of us — her marks, her enablers, her investors and former fans?

那么，这样的信念对我们这些人——她的诈骗对象、她的支持者、她的投资者和她曾经的粉丝——而言又意味着什么呢？

Ripe for the next huckster that comes along, probably. Some Silicon Valley promises are so sweet we just can’t get enough of them. Immortality. Crypto. Flying cars. Mars. Digital harmony. Wealth beyond compare.

或许就是下一个推销时机的成熟。硅谷的一些承诺太过美好，我们简直欲罢不能。长生不老。加密货币。飞行汽车。火星。数字和谐。无与伦比的财富。

As Fitzgerald wrote, we will always be a sucker for the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

正如菲茨杰拉德所写，我们将永远沉迷于一年年在我们眼前渐渐远去的极乐未来。

来源：好英语网