The Dropout on Disney +: A true and insane story worth $ 10 billion

A brilliant, all-successful entrepreneur, Elizabeth Holmes has become the youngest self-made billionaire in the history of the industry. His thriving business Theranos is now one of the flagships of the new industry. However, blinded by excessive ambition and a completely perverted desire for glory, he loses his entire empire and experiences an equally spectacular decline …

The Dropout, a series created by Elizabeth Meriveter with Amanda Seyfried, Navin Andrews, Michelle Gill, Utkarsh Ambudkar. Episodes watched: 3 of 8. Available on Disney +.

The Dropout is a story about a young woman who had everything to become “Female Steve JobsElizabeth Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried with conviction, began life with a very clear idea: get rich. Not just the rich, the billionaires.

An idea that did not come to him by chance. She was returning home from high school one day when she saw that her father (Michelle Gill) was overwhelmed. He recently lost his job at Enron, an American company that went bankrupt worldwide.

Elizabeth is not only determined, she is also brilliant. Also, as soon as he enters the university he is looking for an invention that will revolutionize the world and enrich it. He tries, fails, and then the (genius?) Idea emerges: he invented a machine that conducts cheap blood tests. A kind of shazma of medicine: a simple drop of blood and a diagnosis!

At first it is easy to encourage this brilliant student of Elizabeth, Stanford with this visionary idea that would change the world of medicine but also the lives of patients as they will no longer have to go through countless blood tests.

And he knows how to convince the right people – including a wealthy businessman played by the unidentified Michael Ironside. He quickly set up his own company Theranos. But the image of a brilliant and idealistic young woman is tarnished.

He lives for Teranos and eventually demands that others sacrifice themselves for his cause just as he does. Elizabeth leaves Stanford – hence the title The Dropout, which refers to both an abandoned student and an abandoned one. He raises millions, becomes CEO under 25 and is on the cover of Forbes.

His dark side is further revealed when he realizes that his technology has been away from the predicted result for years and he is not making the right decisions at the time. His lie will then turn into a decade of criminal fraud with the motive that the series predicts at the beginning and end of each episode with excerpts from the pre-trial deposition.

If he does not have a conscience crisis, it will soon happen to his closest associates, including Edmond Kush (James Hiroyuki Liao), who suffers when he tests Elizabeth’s invention on patients: cancer and chemotherapy.

The Dropout takes on a rather classic style and remains in the soothing vessel of condemning the excesses of capitalism, and especially in the start-up business world, without further questioning. And it is Amanda Seyfried’s performance that stands out.

She is stunning in a series of sections in front of a mirror, where Elizabeth shapes her bizarre public persona, ends with a black cousin inspired by Steve Jobs, and dramatically reduces her tone of voice to get better taken seriously.

The series also focuses on the informal relationship between Elizabeth and 19-year-old Sani Balvania (Navin Andrews), who became her closest secret, perhaps the only one, her husband, and finally Theranos’s director of operations.

This strange relationship plays an important role in the series that keeps the ambiguity about its true nature: is it a true love story? A history of violence? From Elizabeth to Sanny or vice versa? Or is it an alliance of two megalomaniac sociopaths?

It’s probably this side a bit easily spectacular, fishing in the series. This true story has enough arguments to impress without adding. Theranos’s market capitalization has reached an insane amount of over $ 10 billion. And the company managed to attract a $ 700 million investment. All this for a car whose promise was never fulfilled.

Elizabeth Holmes was finally caught for her trick. He was convicted in January last year of investor fraud.