Trigger warning: This article briefly discusses suicide.
Hulu’s The Dropouttells the story of how convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes tricked many into believing her company Theranos’ products worked, but thelimited serieschanged a few key things from the true story. The eight-part miniseries is based on the podcast of the same name produced by ABC News and hosted by journalist Rebecca Jarvis. The Dropout was adapted for television by New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether, and it stars Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews in the respective roles of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
The biographical drama starts telling the story somewhat chronologically, showing Elizabeth Holmes as a determined teenager who doesn’t have many friends as she is focused on becoming a billionaire and changing the world. Twin Peaks: The Return star Seyfried shines as Holmes, going as far as nailing the manufactured deep voice the former Theranos CEO is famous for. It's so well done that The Dropout’s Seyfried’s Holmes and the actual Elizabeth Holmes as heard on the ABC News podcast can be mistaken for one another. To convey the podcast’s analysis of Theranos’ many red flags as they became apparent to different people in the company, The Dropout uses temporal jumps. This way, viewers get the Theranos employees’ points of view while also learning behind-the-scenesplot points from the beginning, such as Sunny and Elizabeth’s romantic relationship.
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The use of temporal jumps between 2017, when Holmes’ testimony in the government investigation into Theranos’ fraudulent schemes takes place, and various years before that, which show how Theranos came to be, let The Dropout mirror the way the original podcast plays out. When the ABC News podcast doesn’t mention names and facts the miniseries does, such as Theranos’ validation study with Pfizer, which the podcast only refers to as “major drug company,” John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup investigating on Theranos helps fill in the gaps, showing how the miniseries and reality do not differ that much. Here’s everything The Dropout changed about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes’ true story.
Theranos Poached More Apple Staff
As The Dropout shows Theranos growing quickly, two of the people Seyfried’s Holmes is seen actively courting to go work for her are employed by Apple. The Dropout episode 3 sees Holmes poaching product designer Ana Arriola (One Day At A Time’s Nicky Endres) and Jobs’ right-hand man Avie Tevanian (Amir Arison) from Apple. The episode focuses with precision on the odd things Arriola and Tevanian saw from day one as they started collaborating with Theranos, despite being happy, especially Arriola, to be working under a “young female CEO instead of a co*cky little boy in a sweatshirt,” as Apple’s former product designer puts it.
In reality, though, Holmes didn’t just poach the two senior figures. Holmes wished Theranos to have the same design-first aesthetic as Apple,soshe recruited employees straight from Apple’s ranks.Along with than Arriola, who joined Theranos as chief design architect, and Tevanian, who became a board member of Holmes’ company, Justin Maxwell, Adam Vollmer, and Mike Bauerly soon joined their former Apple colleagues. While Maxwell and Bauerly worked on the design, Vollmer was a development engineer at Theranos.
Avie’s Resignation & Ian Gibbons Taking His Own Life
Hulu’s The Dropout episode 3 shows Tevanian swiftly kicked out from the board right after his introduction. Still, while the miniseries only shows venture capitalist Don Lucas (Michael Ironside) asking Avie to tender his resignation, things were much shadier in reality. According to Tevanian’s interview in The Dropout podcast, when he complied with Lucas’ request to resign, the venture capitalist asked him to sign a document to give his rights away, which he refused. Tevanian then received an email at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve that year from Theranos’ general counsel, saying that he had to sign his rights away, or they would have sued him as they believed that by talking about Theranos he was disparaging the company. While The Dropout is clear in showing how sudden Avie’s resignation was, in reality, the situation was much more unpleasant and complicated.
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How The Dropout depicts Ian Gibbons (The Hobbit’s Stephen Fry) taking his own life and how Theranos deals with it and his widowed wife, Rochelle (Kate Burton), also appear slightly less ruthless than what happened in reality. In the show, one of Ian’s coworkers, engineer Brendan Morris (Bashir Salahuddin), at least sends an email to all of his Theranos coworkers to remember Ian and his achievements after Ian’s death in the hospital following his attemptto end his life. In reality, as Rochelle Gibbons shared on the ABC News podcast, Theranos didn’t even send flowers to acknowledge the death of the scientist employed for10 years by the company. They only reached out with two letters, one to request that all of Theranos’ intellectual property Ian had to be sent back to them, and another from the company’s lawyer, warning Rochelle of a lawsuit if shetold anyone publicly what happened to Ian.
The Walgreens & Safeway Deals
The Dropout episode 4 sees Walgreensasking Kevin Hunter to check Theranos’ lab;Walgreenshires the lab consultant to verify that Theranos’ product works. Thelimited series setsretail chains Walgreens and Safeway one against the other, with The Dropout even showing Holmes letting Walgreens believe Theranos had chosen to work with Safeway to speed up the Walgreens deal. In the show, it’s Walgreens that ends up earning an exclusive deal with Theranos. According to John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, though, not only did Safeway also get a deal with Theranos but did so before the Walgreens deal was finalized. Despite reaching deals with both Safeway and Walgreens, Holmes framed them as exclusive since the first would have been the only supermarket chain to have the Edison in-store while the second was the only drugstore chain to do so. The two companies weren’t thrilled about the arrangement, but they still agreed because otherwise, they believed they would’ve “missed out on a huge new business opportunity.”
Was Elizabeth Holmes Obsessed With Steve Jobs?
The Dropout shows Holmes’ admiration of Steve Jobs multiple times, with the Theranos CEO only using Apple products and even wildly cheering while queuing up with fans at the first iPhone launch. The Dropout podcast explained it went further than that, as what became Holmes’ signature look of a black turtleneck under a jacket was suggested to her by Arriola, who told her about Jobs’ fascination with the Issey Miyake turtleneck, which led Holmes to adopt that attire. Elizabeth Holmes’ obsession with Apple also impacted her job at Theranos, as she decided to employ one of the most exclusive advertisem*nt agencies, Chiat/Day, that created the "1984" and "Think Different" Apple campaigns. Holmes admired Steve Jobs so much that she even kept an article cutout on her desk of a quote by her former Stanford professor Channing Robertson that likened her to “another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs,” as mentioned by engineer Ed Ku in John Carreyrou’s book.
Holmes Avoided Calls & Was Unreachable For Even Longer
Seyfried’s Elizabeth Holmes is shown in The Dropout episode 4 repeatedly trying to dodge Sunny and her brother Christian’s calls, often by telling them she’s about to go into a meeting while she’s actually on the company plane. The Dropout podcast disclosed that, in reality, Holmes managed to dodge calls for days. Chiat/Day’s Stan Fiorito revealed to podcast host Rebecca Jarvis that Holmes “would go dark for a month” when she was unreachable, and Theranos wouldn’t even explain her behavior.
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Elizabeth Holmes’ Lies Were Much Worse
The Dropout shows many lies Holmes and Balwani told employees, prospective collaborators, and financiers. The lies Holmestold in reality, though, were much worse. Chiat/Day’s Stan Fiorito believed Theranos worked with the Pentagon as Holmes told him that her technology was being used in Afghanistan, while Theranos board member and former Secretary of State George Shultz believed hospital operating rooms and medevac helicopters were already using Holmes’ technology, as he trusted Elizabeth’s claims. Hulu’s The Dropout inspiration, the podcast of the same name produced by ABC News, let Holmes disprove her own claims by playing the tape of Elizabeth’s official statement in episode 5, where she finally told the truth and said that Theranos’ Edison was never deployed in emergency rooms, hospitals, battlefield, nor in medevac helicopters. Ultimately, while The Dropoutlargely stayed true to the facts, it made quite a few changes tosoftenElizabeth Holmesand her actions from real life.
Next:
New episodes of the limited series The Dropout release Thursdays on Hulu.
