There is no moral of the story for Silicon Valley.
 | By Jyoti Thottam Deputy Op-Ed Editor |
Nearly twenty years ago, early in my career as a journalist, I went back to Houston to report on the biggest story in the world: the collapse of Enron, the once high-flying energy company that had dazzled my hometown. |
I met former employees who whispered about what they had seen, in the same casual restaurants where they used to have lunch with their colleagues. One of them sneaked me into the headquarters and showed me around the trading floor, a ghost town of abandoned computer monitors. The poem "Ozymandias" immediately came to mind. "Round the decay/ Of that colossal Wreck," I couldn't resist attaching the lessons I learned in high school about hubris and delusions of grandeur. |
Does every story need a lesson at the end? This is the question that Bethany McLean asks in her subtle and thought-provoking essay about the verdict in the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos. McLean wrote the definitive book about Enron and has reported on several cycles of boom and bust, from the dot-com era and the 2008 financial crisis to today's Silicon Valley. In her essay, she asks us to resist the urge to find a message in the Theranos verdict, or to treat the case as a lesson, a fable or a cautionary tale. |
If you were among those following the trial these last few months, you may have been waiting for — at last — a neat ending. But there isn't one. Instead, the jury convicted Holmes on four counts of fraud, acquitted her on other charges and deadlocked on still more. |
"It was precisely the opposite of the verdict I'd expected — and frankly wanted," McLean writes. McLean hoped the jury would send a "message" to entrepreneurs about responsibility and accountability. What they delivered was something much more complicated. |
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