The Adventures of Elizabeth Holmes & Sam Bankman-Fried

What can two modern trojan horses teach investors about human nature?

Photo by Tayla Kohler on Unsplash.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” were the immortal words spoken by an ordinary Trojan priest in Virgil’s ancient epic, the Aeneid, at the first dread sight of a certain wooden horse effigy.

“I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts,” is an admonition for the ages: Gifts aren’t always what they seem.

Of course, the priest’s sage advice, “torch that suspicious horse,” went unheeded and a fortified city let its mortal enemy in through the front gate, as fortified cities often do.

All these many thousand years later, two Trojan Horses were recently received with equal credulity by those who should have known better.

Elizabeth Holmes — once heralded as the second coming of Steve Jobs, the next Madame Curie — is finally facing sentencing for her role in bilking investors out of billions. Hers was a confidence scam for the record books, a veritable sacking by the standards of Virgil.

From Silicon Valley to the fields of advanced medicine, Wall Street to Washington, investors lined up for Holmes’ revolutionary medical device based on little more than smoke and mirrors.