Sunny dances with Holmes in their palatial apartment, wearing a promotional mask of her face. They focus mainly on the machinations of the business, played for high camp, with pop songs turned up loud on the soundtrack. Sequences like these are the best parts of the Hulu show-the funniest, the most absorbing and surprising. Now she just needs to go home and convince Sunny-the older boyfriend she secretly lives with-that he should give her the $20 million and come aboard instead of breaking up. “I’m a girl who had a dream to change the world, and I just didn’t know how hard it would be.…” It takes a minute to notice that she is channeling her Genius service provider, repeating some of her lines verbatim: “I did everything right! I followed all the steps! I was just too quick.…” Then she makes the crucial pivot: She’s bringing in her own adult, “an old friend,” Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), as COO, with a $20 million personal investment, and they plan to start flogging their tests straight to retail customers-like an Apple store for blood. At this point, to the visible discomfort of the roomful of older men, Holmes begins to weep. They tell her she needs “adult supervision”: Her futuristic blood-testing gadget is still nonfunctional, FDA approval is nowhere in sight, the promised big pharma deals are stalled, the design team has quit, and she’s hemorrhaging cash. Soon, we see Holmes confront the board of Theranos as they attempt to push her out as CEO. You’re just a person.” The Genius looks a little stunned by this, but it’s only when she realizes she has messed up professionally-all Holmes’s data has been wiped-that she begins to stammer and cry: “I did everything right! I mean, I followed all the steps! I was just too quick.…” Holmes, meanwhile, consoles her server with the insight that everything will be OK for her, in the sense that “Nothing you do will matter, because you don’t really care. The Genius reassures her customer that the information on her existing device will only be visible for a few seconds while it’s transferred. Here the two nervy women seem to be trying to give each other a pep talk. In this scene from Hulu’s new miniseries The Dropout, Holmes has not yet adopted her well-known deep voice or the regulation black Issey Miyake turtleneck she’d wear in homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs. One is a Genius for hire the other, played by Amanda Seyfried, is Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout who founded the startup Theranos, claimed the company could run hundreds of medical tests using a mere finger prick of blood, received media fanfare as the youngest self-made female billionaire, and is now, many years later, awaiting sentencing for wire fraud. Inside the soothing, edgeless white of an Apple Genius Bar in Palo Alto, two blonde-haired women widen their innocent eyes at each other across an unbridgeable gulf of understanding.
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