The more things change
Software Elixir Cures All
This is not about Elizabeth Holmes
“This famous charlatan … ran a career still more extraordinary. He was the arch-quack of his age, the last of the great pretenders to the philosopher’s stone and the water of life, and during his brief season of prosperity, one of the most conspicuous characters of Europe.”
— Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, Charles MacKay
They were an amazing entrepreneurial couple having announced to the world a new technology with powerful health and medical benefits. They had the backing of the wealthiest families, key government officials, and gained the admiration of the people. But it was all a hoax, and eventually the two healthtech start-up founders were put on trial. Till the very end they proclaimed their innocence and were firmly set in their belief of only wanting to help the people!
Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes? Nope.
Please meet Count and Countess Cagliostro one of history’s — well until recently — greatest grifter couples.
Whaaat, you never heard about these 18th-century European charlatans? Neither did I until began my own journey looking into the history of the deluded thinking of common folk. It’s an eternal condition of humans that has enabled con men and women to easily separate the gullible from their money.
If you want more details, refer to Charles MacKay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It’s my go-to source for understanding conspiracy theories, MAGA, and other strange disruptions in the ectosphere.
In the case of the Cagliostro, their invention was something called the “elixir of life”, or elixir vitae in the original tech-speak of the day — i.e. Latin. This was a special substance that was thought to promote health and prolong life — maybe even grant immortality.
Totally crazy but people have believed for centuries such a thing could exist. And they had incredible faith that it could be produced by the high-tech geniuses of the day — a group know as alchemists. Yeah, the same folks who could turn lead into gold.
Fans of Harry Potter will also know this magical drink to be a major plot point in The Philosopher’s Stone installment of the Potter series.
The Cagliostros worked the street a little differently, circa 1780s. He had studied under the great scholars at their places of higher learning. No, we ain’t talking about universities in Paris or London. The best alchemists and medical researchers of the time could be found in the East — Medina in Arabia or Alexandria in Egypt. At least that’s where Mr. C. claimed he received his education studying the original Arabic manuscripts.
On return to Europe, he associated himself with one Pinto of Malta, who had his own lab where he experimented with transmuting pewter into gold. The duo didn’t have much success, so Cagliostro performed a magic trick that actually does work and has been performed by today’s software startup entrepreneurs.
It’s called a pivot.
I’ve seen software startups perform logic defying pivots during my own time with these digital grifters. Once upon a time, I joined an infosec company just before their IPO. Management suddenly decided the platform had a special secret sauce of “big data analytics” — remember that? And so almost overnight the marketing changed from data security to computational algorithms. Their goal was to attract investors with the latest cool buzzwords!
For the Count, this meant shifting to his elixir subsidiary — i.e., selling vials of the special potion he claimed could cure all kinds of ills and bring back youthful energy. The immortality part I suppose would come in version 2.0 of the elixir vitae?
Anyway, with letters of introduction from Pinto, he set up shop in Rome. And it’s there that he met his future Countess, a beautiful scamtress named Lorenza Feliciana. Not unlike Holmes, she came from a once great family that was now down on its luck and fortunes. She also had incredible talents of persuasion and charm and according to MacKay had “the least principles of any of the maidens of Rome.”
Together they were the Holmes and Balwani of their day. In addition to selling potions, they would freely pivot as needed, engaging in fortune telling and other dark arts. When their welcome would eventually wear out — the scammed realized their mistake — they took off to another European capital where they were then warmly greeted and started their grift cycle all over again.
The Cagliostros could carry off this scamming because basic long distance communication — telegraph, telephone — hadn’t been invented. They could count on an infinite supply of clueless suckers. And since real science was just getting started, you had the right conditions to make the 18th and 19th centuries a golden age of quackery.
Eventually the duo went a little too far. As is often the case, they pivoted into good ol’ and very profitable religious scamming — contacting spirits, prophesizing, and Rosicrucianism (look it up!)
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This led to charges of heresy and sorcery, and they were confined to Paris’s infamous Bastille. Papal authorities commuted the Count’s sentence to perpetual imprisonment in Rome’s Castle St. Angelo where his health rapidly declined and he died.
With instant communication, scientific experts, and the Intertoobz, what excuse do us moderns have falling for tacky elevator pitches?
No one still believes the elixir vitae, right? Well … yes they do! The modern variant goes by the name “med beds”, which is a kind of Star Trek medical scanner and cure all that is an article of faith among the MAGA wing-nuts.
Well, for many of us, including the .1%, if the kraziness has a nutritious coating of scientific magic it becomes far more appealing … and also sellable to investors and the rubes who love buzzwords and gadgets.
Then the scam, no matter how insane, can work!
So for Sunny and Elizabeth, this meant exploiting their Stanford connections, yakking about micro-fluidics and nanotechnology and hiring former Apple employees.
The other innovation of the scamming Cagliostros that modern con artistes have mastered was their slipperiness when trying to pin them down. They were experts at pivoting from one scam to another.
A less well known factoid about Holmes is that the blood testing machine was not her first scam!
Her original idea was an unworkable arm patch that could monitor for infected cells, deliver antibiotics using teeny needles, and thus cure you of disease or cancer or whatever.
She raised $6 millions from friends, family, and investors for this nutso idea.
Her Stanford advisor, the irreplaceable Dr. Phyllis Gardener — she died in 2025 — told Holmes the patch idea was unworkable because of basic facts about infectious diseases, chemistry, physics, etc. — “She was a young kid with only rudimentary engineering training and no medical training [emphasis mine]”.
And it didn’t. The company she started was called Theranos, which was a combination of therapy and diagnosis.
She dropped the therapy part because the patch was a total failure, and then focused on diagnostics. And then decided, based on no real-science, that with micro-fluidics a machine could perform a full range of medical tests on a single drop of blood.
Again, a completely insane idea. Her first iteration was the Edison machine.
That’s the blood testing device investors came to company headquarters to see and try out first hand. After their fingers were pricked and their blood samples dropped into the Edison, they continued the tour expecting results shortly. Theranos employees then secretly took the samples out, ran to the basement, and dropped the vials into a giant Siemens machine.
Scam accomplished.
When Edison proved too small and inefficient in theory to handle the huge amount of tests promised for the giant pharmacy chains, like Walgreens, the company pivoted again.
Their final creation before they went out of business was the robotic MiniLab. A contraption that was supposed to perform more tests and handle more samples. It never worked. It’s careening centrifuges and faulty robotic arms were skewered in Alex Gibney’s (hilarious) Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
I’ve long known about software companies shapeshifting powers. For too many companies, the software features are in the eye of the beholder. Marketingware or vaporware in tech slang. In other words, lots of minimally viable products that just barely worked and would take years of product updates to work out the worst of the bugs.
For software, it’s what you want to see in the product — like the proverbial Rorschach test. And when people catch on to the basic limitations in the software, the management will pivot again.
The infosec company I used to work for? It’s now boasting about its AI technology to spot and remove malware.
Holmes and her co-conspirator Balwani, who was a freakin’ Microsoft executive, learned that in Silicon Valley illusions can sell as long as they use the right buzzwords and conjure the right spirits — Steve Jobs, for example.
Like the Cagliostros before them, the Theranos duo didn’t really believe in anything other than their power to get their victims to believe.
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