Disgraced local biotech whiz kid and accused fraudster Elizabeth Holmes came throatily back into the news in recent months because of HBO's release of Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney's The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley. And apparently she was recently chased through the Great Meadow at Fort Mason by an Inside Edition news crew.
Rumor has it that Holmes, though likely mostly lying low as she awaits her criminal trial, is residing somewhere in the Marina neighborhood after losing the mansion that Theranos was paying for in Los Altos. Vanity Fair reported last month that she's living in a luxury apartment somewhere in SF. (That piece also reported via former Theranos employees that Holmes had remained bizarrely "chipper" throughout the entire implosion of the company, and the only time she "lost her cool" was when she was cut off financially and lost that house. "She had a fit," one employee said.)
Esquire reported two weeks ago, via ABC's Holmes-focused podcast The Dropout, that a former colleague had run into Holmes recently at a restaurant in Sausalito. She was apparently there with her adorable new 27-year-old fiancé, hotel heir and former LinkedIn employee Billy Evans, and she was "dressed in a dark hoodie and jeans and didn’t look to have any makeup on or anything." That former colleague, software engineer Michael Craig, added, "She seemed a little bit worn-down, but she didn’t seem like somebody who had done anything wrong."
Now, Inside Edition says "We found her!", and also adds, for color, that she was "looking like she didn't have a care in the world" and "she sure looks happy prancing around San Francisco!" They have a shot of her with Evans (who's, ironically, wearing a t-shirt that says "Take a Walk on the Wild Side") walking down Steiner Street in the Marina with Holmes' dog Balto. (See the Vanity Fair piece for the explanation of the dog's name, and how Holmes started referring to the husky as a "wolf.")
here is balto the wolf, elizabeth holmes at burning man, holmes as a leash baby, elizabeth holmes in love by the sea pic.twitter.com/vXJUhfWp8Z
— Jocelyn Silver (@silverjocelyn) February 22, 2019
Awkwardly, the Inside Edition crew chases the "Millennial Bernie Madoff" to Fort Mason's Great Meadow, where a correspondent tries to get Holmes to answer questions like, "Do you have anything to say to the young women in tech who looked up to you?!" The IE reporter also says, "A lot of people think it was heartless that you were partying at Burning Man while your company was closing down."
Holmes remains silent, but the tabloid show gets in one last dig by interviewing a couple of neighbors at her building. “I didn’t know until she spoke,” one woman tells the IE team. “As soon as she opened her mouth, I was like, ‘Bingo, that is her.’”
Meanwhile, according to Vanity Fair, Holmes has told former colleagues that in the Marina she is "greeted by well-wishers on the street who are rooting for her resurrection." Really, though?
Let's not forget that Holmes's dad, Christian Holmes, was an executive at Enron. As another former Theranos employee told investigative reporter John Carreyrou (whose book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup Holmes apparently blames for the company's collapse), "One of Elizabeth’s superpowers is she never looks back."
h/t: The Cut