‘Silicon Valley’ Made Fun of Elizabeth Holmes Before It Was Cool

Years before Twitter was flooded with impressions of Elizabeth Holmes’ baritone, Silicon Valley was there with possibly the greatest Theranos burn in television history. And on the 5th anniversary of this expertly in-the-know comedy, it deserves some special recognition.

Ever since its premiere in April of 2014, Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky’s HBO series has always excelled at insult comedy. However, Silicon Valley is always at its best when it’s at its most obscure, winking at the chaotic rise and fall of Juicero in its opening credits or mocking Peter Thiel’s blood boys. Yet even by Silicon Valley‘s bitingly funny standards, its Theranos burn is brutal.

Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud-filled blood testing company is only referenced once outside of the show’s opening credits. Season 3’s finale “The Uptick” predictably sees Richard (Thomas Middleditch) in the middle of another company-fueled panic. Unbeknownst to Richard, his righthand man Jared (Zach Woods) outsourced Pied Piper’s photo sharing platform to a click farm. Though Pied Piper’s analytics data claims that it has thousands of active users, almost all of those users are fraudulent. It’s a bad problem to have, but it doesn’t become potentially company-ruining until Erlich (T.J. Miller) uses those fake numbers to unknowingly lie to real investors.

Richard is faced with a choice. He can either come clean about Jared’s mistake or lean into the fraudulent user data, running a zombie program to make the fake user activity look even more convincing. Basically he has to decide between telling the truth and losing the company he’s given everything for or lying to an investment firm and potentially gaining $6 million. Jared quietly reminds his beloved boss that what he’s considering is fraud, prompting Richard to deliver this gem:

“Is it? Our platform does exactly what we say it does. It’s not like we’re lying about it like fucking Theranos.”

It’s the timing of this insult that makes the burn so retroactively rewarding. Theranos was the darling unicorn of the startup world until around October of 2015. That’s when John Carreyrou started questioning the validity of the company’s technology for the Wall Street Journal. It was thanks in large to this reporting that the healthcare company claiming to run hundreds of tests using a single drop of blood was revealed to be little more than expensive, Walgreens-deceiving smoke and mirrors.

Carreyrou would later go on to write the explosive book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. It was also around the beginning of Theranos’ end when Silicon Valley was in production for its third season. The series’ Theranos jab was thrown in years before Elizabeth Holmes became the social media-stopping fraudster she is in the wake of of Alex Gibney’s The Inventor.

Yet more than its timeliness, it it’s the way this particular joke is delivered that packs the biggest punch. The version of Richard Hendricks we know after Season 5 has stooped to all sorts of morally questionable lows to keep Pied Piper afloat, but Season 3 Richard wasn’t yet a monster. He still had morals and naive dreams to become a different kind of CEO. Richard’s decision to lie to investors marks the first time he consciously chose to do something illegal and morally irredeemable to save his company. Ultimately he can’t go through with his own plan, but the malicious glimpse of the manipulative CEO he would later start to become is still there.

And who is attached to Richard’s big, morally compromised shift? Elizabeth freaking Holmes.

So, sure. Your black turtleneck GIF may be fun. But there’s only one show that had the foresight to almost directly connect the corporate moral failings of its hero to the leader of Theranos a full three years before HBO tackled the Silicon Valley celebrity. Again.

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