Instead, she’d be queen of an infomercial empire, wearing her trademark black turtleneck and bright lipstick, bantering with a jocular male co-host about how a lifelong fear of needles inspired her to invent a device for blood testing that required no more than a finger prick. She’d be hawking her Theranos Edison device on daytime TV — buy one, get two free! — and touting it as the busy working person’s workaround to time-consuming and painful medical testing. The limitations of the device would be disclosed up-front (or at least, clearly outlined in the fine print), but nobody would be all that bothered; the Edison would be just another as-seen-on-TV novelty gadget that retirees order on impulse and use a couple times before getting bored and moving onto something else.

Because frauds, scammers, and snake oil salesmen are everywhere, and have always been with us, a warped but essential thread woven tightly into our social fabric. The most gifted of them promise what Holmes did, more or less: a quick fix to a problem that runs too deep, too dark, and too tangled to be pulled out at the root. They prey on our worst insecurities and most potent fears — of getting fat, of going bald, of being poisoned by hidden toxins, of being painfully jabbed with a needle and spending the next week praying that some nascent sickness doesn’t reveal itself in the chemical balance of your blood.

They prey, most of all, on our mistrust of a system that is opaque, indifferent, and populated by experts who too often treat us with disdain or contempt. That’s what makes people pick up the phone and call now to take advantage of this special offer, two vials of snake oil for the price of one. It doesn’t matter if the solution actually works — and it doesn’t, usually. What’s important is, it makes you feel like you’re in control. Like you’re included.

More from this author

The Left would sacrifice the unvaccinated

By Kat Rosenfield

Society allows thousands of con artists to have long and fruitful careers selling their cellulite creams, their silicone bracelets that “rebalance your body’s energy field” — just as long as they never fly too close to the sun. They must not take it too seriously or too far. Some of the best-executed frauds can continue for years, even decades, if they just stay on the right side of the line between frivolity and consequence.

Look at Gwyneth Paltrow, forever making a fortune selling yoni eggs, supplements and sex toys that promise nothing except the satisfaction of feeling like you’re taking care of yourself and the thrill of doing it outside the staid, stodgy, finger-wagging confines of the medical establishment. But Paltrow plays it safe. She keeps it light. She reminds you that what she’s selling is not medicine, but wellness. (Unsaid but implied is that it’s better than medicine, but shh, that’s our little secret.)

And in exchange for slightly limiting their claims about the proven effectiveness of their products, the snake oil salesmen are allowed to dodge the usual rules and regulations that dictate what you can and can’t sell to consumers. This is America, after all; who is the FDA to tell you that you can’t spend your money on any stupid thing you want? Sometimes, it’s easy to see the grift for what it is — the Slap Chop? the Shake Weight? really? — but Silicon Valley and influencer circles have incubated their own version of this culture, glossier and more sophisticated, in which it’s genuinely hard to tell a genius vision from an ordinary scam.

Suggested reading

Influencers will survive Covid

By Sarah Ditum

The thing is, sometimes it is genius: every life-altering tech innovation started as an idea too crazy to work, and every celebrated founder did a certain amount of faking it before making it. Even Steve Jobs fudged his way through the very first iPhone presentation with a device that did not actually work, surreptitiously switching out the phone for a new one before the prototype could crash, a story that Elizabeth Holmes was reportedly obsessed with. Like Jobs, she insisted, she wasn’t lying to her investors. She was simply showing them the future. Sure, her product didn’t work — but imagine how amazing it would be if it did?

The twist is, Holmes probably could have been wildly successful, even legit, if she’d just set her sights a little bit lower. With those brains, that face, that voice, and her pitching skills, she could have launched a startup — or become an influencer — in any number of fields. But she wanted more: to occupy the prestigious ranks of the corporate girlbosses, the visionary founders, the moguls who broke the mould. And so the Theranos Edison was inflated, from a don’t-check-the-small-print daytime TV product, to a groundbreaking biotech advancement; and Holmes the huckster became, briefly, the darling wunderkind of Silicon Valley.

Of course, she never really belonged in that club: Holmes, unlike the girlbosses she was always getting lumped-in with, never actually built anything. The fact that she managed to fly so high and linger so long is a testament less to her own abilities than to the brightness of the star to which she hitched her wagon, the fierce desire of so many to see a young, ambitious woman breaking ground in a male-dominated field. It’s a different sort of sexism: the way she dazzled them, and the way the media wanted to believe. Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t just too good to be true, but too good to verify.

Glamour magazine’s fawning 2015 profile described critiques of the Theranos founder as just so much chest-thumping from threatened competitors: “Like any disruptor, Holmes has stirred up controversy.” The blitheness of that line now contrasts amusingly with a chagrined editor’s note appended above the text in 2018 (“The SEC found that Holmes ‘made numerous false and misleading statements in investor presentations, product demonstrations, and media articles’ — and that includes interviews with Glamour.”) Inc magazine gushed: “She is no impostor. She was an entrepreneur before movies and television made it cool. She is substance where often there’s only flash.”

Suggested reading

How Albania became a pyramid scheme

By Gavin Haynes

And so, for a few thrilling years, as investors and fortunes amassed around Theranos, Holmes actually appeared to be leading a herd of high-achieving, self-made female entrepreneurs that included people like Away’s Steph Korey, Glossier’s Emily Weiss, and Outdoor Voices’ Tyler Haney. It wouldn’t be until later, as the cult of the girlboss began to fracture and the herd began to thin, that we’d realise she wasn’t leading the charge at all, but being pushed forward by the sheer force of everyone else’s success, riding the wave of a narrative so powerful that her feet never touched the ground. But when they did, she stumbled immediately — and stumbled hard. And now she’s probably going to prison.

What’s most striking is how Holmes tried and failed to wriggle out from beneath her own hype as the walls closed in. At her trial, the black turtleneck was gone, replaced by a blouse-and-blazer combination and an accessory diaper bag (the better to remind jurors and press that she’s a mother with a newborn at home.) Gone was the image of an ass-kicking visionary, hell-bent on success: Holmes’ defence rested in large part on the notion that she’d been helpless, cowed and manipulated by her former boyfriend and business partner, Sunny Balwani.

Yet the jury didn’t buy it — because Holmes is too brilliant a con artist to also be a damsel in distress. And like any gifted grifter, she created a narrative so compelling that even when it all fell apart, we understood that some small part of it must still be the truth. Not the world-changing technology, but the persona of the woman who promised to deliver it. That’s real; we’re sure of it. The one thing that has always been clearly and demonstrably true of Elizabeth Holmes is that she is too smart not to know exactly what she’s doing.

The myth of Theranos might have shattered, but the legend of its founder lingers on. And as long as society remains in thrall to the narrative of the disruptor, the glass ceiling-breaker, the patriarchy-smasher, she won’t be the only one. If Elizabeth Holmes hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent her — and in some ways, we did. Without all that glowing coverage to prop it up, how much sooner would this paper tiger have toppled? Holmes and others like her will keep coming, because they have the greatest weapon in the con artist’s arsenal: not the slick presentation, not the pretty face, not the lies they tell while looking you dead in the eye, but your own desperate hunger to believe.

A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.

Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.

That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.

Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.

Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:

“Nah, don’t tell anyone about it, bro.”

Wow, just wow. I mean, he paid for that (allegedly). Yet perhaps I am being unrealistic, and even unfair in my expectation that Bezos be all will-to-power all the time. Love can make fools of kings, as the philosopher Bryan Ferry reminds us. Besides, even that interpretation may be jumping to conclusions; Bezos’s consultation with the psychic may not have been the consequence of an otherwise rational mind scrambled by love.

Who is to say that he doesn’t visit psychics regularly to consult on all manner of things? He wouldn’t be the first powerful person to do so. The Reagan White House had a secret astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was sought on far more consequential matters than running a retail empire, while Hillary Clinton roamed the halls having conversations with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt, although she claims it was a psychological exercise. And what about that time T. Blair and his wife Cherie smeared fruit over each other in a replica Mayan pyramid as part of a “rebirthing” ritual? A trip to the psychic seems pretty tame next to that.

More from this author

A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

Meanwhile, Bezos’s behavior is not necessarily an outlier among his peers in the tech world. Many of these hi-tech oligarchs have an interest in the spiritual side of existence. Steve Jobs was a big fan of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi (also the inspiration for the ultra-proggy Yes LP Tales from Topographic Oceans) and also retained a Zen master to serve as his spiritual adviser.

Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, is a devotee of self-actualization and yoga. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter spent a recent birthday on a 10 day silent meditation trip to Myanmar. And Anthony Levandowski, an engineer central to both Google and Uber’s self-driving car programs established his own church (of AI). I could go on, but you get the picture.

It also turns out that my somewhat down-at-heel conception of what a consultation with a psychic looks like is less than accurate, at least when it comes to the super-wealthy. Roadside mediums are for the proles; Bezos’s psychic is reported to have cost “thousands”. In fact, those with a talent for talking to the dead or revealing the future can make good money if they can nurture the right kind of clientele.

For instance Laura Day, a “financial psychic” who advised both Wall Street bankers and the CEO of data storage firm Seagate Technology, charged $10,000 a month for her services, and that was back in 2008. Branding is important with this elite audience; for instance, Robert Ohotto, an astrologer whose clients are reported to include Google executives, describes himself as an ”intuitive life strategist”; David Zarza, who, like Amazon, is based in Seattle, describes himself as a “psychic medium and intuitive life coach.”

More from this author

The End of the World is always nigh

By Daniel Kalder

Indeed, the mystic offerings on offer in today’s America have proliferated like the varieties of kombucha on offer in Whole Foods (acquired by Bezos in 2017), as entrepreneurs of the $pirit world have sought to establish a presence in this increasingly crowded marketplace.

A quick Google search for metaphysical services in my local area turned up such options as “profound reading and instant healing”, an “eclectic intuitive”, varying takes on astrology, “wise women holistic services”, “angel readings”, “aura readings”, “intuitive-angelic-reiki readings”, an “intuitive tune-up” consultation, “throat chakra clearing”, “spirit whispering” and “Akashic record readings” based on “theosophy and anthroposophy.”

Thus the language of mediums merges with the language of wellness, a crossover exemplified by episode six of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, currently streaming on Netflix and which I absolutely do not recommend unless you are writing an article about psychics for UnHerd and need to do some research.

And even then, I do not recommend it. In this episode, the queen of this notorious wellness/lifestyle brand (valued at over $250 million) dispatches her millennial, (mostly) female employees to discover their inner mediums by participating in assorted exercises aimed at channeling the dead with a certain Laura Lynne Jackson. What was most striking to me was how aggressively boring the show was; there was no spooky music, no crystal balls, nothing morbid.

The studio was tasteful and brightly lit, some of the activities took place in a lush garden, the graphics were straight out of a lifestyle magazine, the millennials were all young and upbeat (bar one sceptic, who even so still smiled a lot), and the language was of “energy” and “connection” as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter — a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.

This was the world of psychics gone fully mainstream, but it doesn’t end there. For those who like a dash of intersectionality with their “mystical services”, there’s always Chani Nicholas, the subject of one of the most eye-wateringly terrible articles published in the last decade, on the website of the perennially-straining-to-get down-with-the-kids Rolling Stone: “Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology”. And no, that’s not a Titania McGrath spoof.

Suggested reading

Are mental health apps totally useless?

By Tom Chivers

As organized religion declines in the US, this all comes with a certain dreary predictability; I am reminded, once again, of the observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Nature abhors a vacuum and today’s spiritual entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the gap. Indeed, according to one report, the demand for “psychic services” in the US is growing steadily and the market is worth around $2 billion.

Little wonder, then, that Venture Capital is trying to get a slice of the action. Want to know what the stars have in store for you? There is an app for that; more than one, in fact. For a mere $19.99 a month Sanctuary  will provide you with birth charts, opportunities to talk to professional astrologers and promises “weekly cosmic insights sent straight to your inbox.” Meanwhile, Co-Star promises “hyper-personalized, real time horoscopes” and claims to utilize an AI that “merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers”. Both have attracted millions of dollars in Venture Capital, according to The New York Times.

But that gives me another thought. What if Bezos is not, in fact, a fool for love, nor as keen on metaphysics and mysteries of the soul as some of his tech oligarch peers? Could it be that his interest in the psychic realm is actually part of his plan for world domination, and that this most relentless of tycoons has his eye on the growing market for spiritual services?

Could spirit mediums and astrology soon join keto-friendly organic kelp granules, data storage and the Washington Post on the ever growing list of products and services owned and/or supplied by Bezos? Will Amazon Prime soon include insight into our fortunes alongside movies and free two-day shipping?

Psychics of America, gaze into your futures. Bezos is coming.