Warm Take: a story behind a story

When “not serious” people have serious money, their decisions have weighty consequences. Money is gravity. Or at least, that’s a takeaway from my last evening of appointment TV with Succession.

So, about those investors who a funded biotech started by a 20-something with one year of college, and no apparent track record as a high school science prodigy. Were they serious people?

Yeah, I’m still thinking about Elizabeth Holmes, heading for prison tomorrow.  

And about The New York Times story I shared last time, Amy Chozick’s celebrity business profile of Holmes. What’s the purpose of business profiles? Who are they for? What is The New York Times for, anyways?

Like a gift from the universe, this week I received a response to my weird Anne Libby musings. Amy Chozick talked to Max Linsky at the Longform podcast about her NYT Holmes profile. I’m not going to lie, I listened several times. I figured out how to pull a bootleg transcript; I read it. Then I read it again, with a highlighter. (Quiet few days before the holiday, lol.)

Formerly a New York Times staff writer, Chozick left journalism a few years ago to become a Hollywood showrunner. She describes her path into reporting this story for her old editors at the Times, kind of a side job, as well as the controversy about the profile.

The Longform interview answered one of my questions: what was the article’s purpose?

For Holmes, according to Chozick, Holmes felt that nobody knew her, or what she felt and thought about Theranos, and the last 20 years of her life. (Outside of court, I guess.)  

After 7 years of media silence, for the NYT, a Holmes interview was newsworthy.

And for Chozick, who no longer works as a journalist, it was the opportunity to do a “juicy” story, adding color and context on her own terms, working with editors she loves. And to offer her perspective for the reader.

“I want to explain to people what it feels like to be around someone who you know, you shouldn't believe, but you can't help believing them because this is what their personality is like when you're with them.”

Amy Chozick, Longform Podcast #535

I had felt that the Times story had (maybe?) positioned Holmes as a sort of Tom Ripley-like character. The podcast added perspective. Maybe Holmes was more like someone I’ve seen before — a favorite yoga teacher, or a Soul Cycle instructor — only made weightier, lent gravity by hundreds of millions of other people’s dollars.

Also, platformed by the media.

Indeed, Chozick notes the difficulty of reporting a story whose subject committed fraud, partly “perpetrated by swooning articles in magazines.”

Linsky and Chozick's discussion also addressed the limitations of any one story. For one, Chozick comments that the Times has covered incarceration elsewhere; it wasn't for her to address motherhood and incarceration.

So, the story also wasn't to talk about what happens when women play in the big leagues, and take a fall that the boys don’t take when they fail, screw up, or break the law. It got me thinking about Martha Stewart’s trip to jail in the early 00s. Notably, Holmes and Stewart both fought in court — neither showed contrition by pleading guilty, in hopes of a lesser sentence. Stewart went to jail for less than a year; Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years. (Which is more than some who participated in the violence on January 6, but I digress.)

The profile also wasn't meant to be be a critique about the machine that made Holmes into a media sensation, platformed by those “swooning articles.”  

Last time, I mentioned Taffy Brodesser-Akner's, um, bananas profile of another controversial female founder, Gwyneth Paltrow. Here's Taffy, on writing her Paltrow profile for the Times.

“…the thing I do is an ironic or absurd play against the thing it’s in. Right, like, to write an emo Gwyneth Paltrow story in The New York Times font is not the same as just writing a Gwyneth -- like, part of the theatre of that story, or of any story, is that it’s in The New York Times. And The New York Times is a place where you can expect serious, in-depth journalism, and not someone who is crying all the time, or has to go to the bathroom, or who is afraid of someone…”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Longform Podcast #511

Indeed, what is The New York Times for? Well, Adam Neumann expressed his regrets, on stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the 2021 NYT DealBook conference. Ahem.

I spend what feels like an abnormal amount of time playing the NYT Spelling Bee, partly because it's become an idiosyncratic family interaction with my sisters and mom. I’m about to replace an old dutch oven with an enameled cast iron Lodge; they’ve tested it at Wirecutter, and I don’t trust certain family members to not screw up the enamel on the more expensive and, according to the NYT, not-appreciably better Le Creuset.

Is The New York Times for product recommendations and online gaming? I guess so! I was thinking about this when listening to WNYC's Brooke Gladstone interview Ben Smith about the bitter lessons learned at BuzzFeed News, link below.

Also of interest, Chozick and her editors at The Times seem to think that billionaires and their families are…really smart? That statemanship could make someone good at…investing in medical devices? Yes, there’s weight, there’s gravity, in money, and in power. But gravity is not intelligence, weight is not competence.

Media portrayals and storytelling about non-fictional characthers have a weight too. It trickles into our lives, and our leadership. Elizabeth/Liz Holmes claims to have gotten lost while playing “…a character I created,” based on inventors and geniuses and Silicon Valley legends.

I’m not sure whose job it is to interrogate how the media interacts with individual people, money, and power. We could use some analysis on the truly bizarre practice of investing huge sums to stand up organizations helmed by inexperienced, not-yet-competent leaders.

As for Chozick's story, the Longform podcast discussion illuminates, even without addressing all of the story’s limitations. After listening, it was enough for me to let the profile be what it was: a "cinematic" character study of a pop-culture icon.

I do not care about the losses incurred by people who who invested millions in Theranos. I do care about the young people who bet their early careers on this rotten venture.

Some of the largely-millennial workforce joining startups in the early/mid 10s believed they were changing the world – a trope created and magnified by the same forces that platformed Holmes, Neumann, and their peers. I also care about people whose working experience didn't, or won't, live up to their founders' storytelling prowess.

As a new generation enters our workplaces, I think about the Gen-Zers in my life, who seem less inclined to buy into stories about sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. This next generation of young people needs managers to lean on more truth, and less narrative.

Millennials now have hard-won experience with the downside of this narrative. My hope is that it positions them to lead, and lead well, as we feel our way into the future we're co-creating.

Thanks so much for reading this Warm Take, so-much-longer than I thought it would be, and I didn't even get everything in there lol. I've been noodling about this all for a while, and more so since I heard the Longform episode. Today's newsletter is going out by email only to supporting members, though I'll probably pull it from behind the paywall fairly soon.

It's likely that I'll fix typos and tighten up some phrasing later on, on the Internet*. Thank you for supporting my newsletter, so much.

For those of you whose families have lost loved ones in all of our wars, my heart is with you.

May you, your loved ones, co-workers, and neighbors be safe, healthy and free,

Anne Libby

*indeed, I substantially edited and updated this post after sending it out.

Showing my work

Everything? much? of what I've written about (media about) Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes:

• Warm Take: Rebrand This; May 7, 2023
• Warm Take: assumptions and consequences; December 4, 2022
• Warm Take: The Heroine's Journey Goes Mainstream (Media). September 19, 2021
• Platforms: On Management #45; October 18, 2020
• Always Be Coaching: On Management #36; April 8, 2019
• On Management #29, Summer Reading; July 15, 2018

And more:

• Longform Podcast #535: Amy Chozick, Wednesday, May 24, 2023. The story behind the story – if you have followed Elizabeth Holmes, and especially if you read Amy Chozick's profile, and/or if you're a lowkey media critc, I can't recommend this interview more highly. I put "cinematic" in quotes above, it's from Chozick in this interview.
• Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth, by Amy Chozick, The New York Times, May 7 2023. Lol, the story behind the podcast, and my last two newsletters.
• Ben Smith on the Death of BuzzFeed News, On the Media, May 24, 2023. I only listened to this once, though I did reread the transcript. Chilling, imo, especially when Ben describes some of the things that turned out differently than they expected. Brooke Gladstone doesn't let him off the hook.
• Longform Podcast #511: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, November 9, 2022.  NB: like Chozick, Brodesser-Akner has also worked as a Hollywood showrunner, Brodesser-Akner for the limited-series adaptation of her book, Fleishman is in Trouble.
• Silicon Valley is learning the wrong lesson from Elizabeth Holmes’s trial verdict, by Claire Zillman and Emma Hinchcliffe in Fortune's Broadsheet newsletter, January 4, 2022 at 7:49 AM CST. NB: I don't think any media property platformed Elizabeth Holmes as hard as Fortune did. Where is the curiosity about how that happened? (h/t Marjorie N.)
• ‘It went to my head’: Adam Neumann has regrets about his time at WeWork, Michael J. de la Merced, NY Times, Nov. 9, 2021, which he expressed at the 2021 NY Times Deal Book summit. Sam Bankman-Fried apparently described his “bad month” at the November 2022 NY Times DealBook summit; did not watch.)
• John Carreyrou’s final chapter on Theranos, interview with Nilay Patel at the Verge, Sep 28, 2021. Great Holmes explainer, at the time of the trial, an interview with the journalist who broke the story on Theranos. I read the transcript, didn't listen.
• The Elizabeth Holmes Trial Is A Wake-Up Call for Sexism in Tech, NY Times Opinion, by Ellen Pao, September 15, 2021. Weirdly, I do care, slightly, about Holmes. Or maybe, the next Holmes. At the outset, she was a green post-adolescent -- not a serious person! – and should not have been placed in a position to do so much damage, to so many people. Who mentored her, other than the person whom she has said assaulted and abused her? Who told her it was normal and ok to take some of the truly reprehensible actions she admitted? Where was her support network, a 20-something who had been given so much money and attention, only to be weighted by its gravity? And, conjecture: did she wind up in court, at all, because some investors were sore losers, and swung their weight around in a way that we don't often see in startup-land?