Excellent HBO documentary on the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes

The Alex Gibney HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) is a no-holds-barred, chilling account of the extremely strange founder of the defunct health-care start-up, Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes apparently dropped out of Stanford and with the backing of an extremely powerful board of directors (and stockholders), including the likes of Henry Kissinger, General Mattis, David Boice, and George Schulz (i.e., hugely powerful older white men seemingly enthralled by this charming, well-spoken 20something) started a company that promised "empower" consumers by making blood tests far simpler (finger prick rather than needle drawn into a tube) and significant (providing far more info at much lower price). Extremely articulate, with a great stage and public presence and a carefully tended, striking image, she talked her way into a cover story in Fortune, a NYer profile, and many, many speaking engagements and awards - yet the company was a complete and total fraud, never coming close to building a product that could even remotely accomplish the basic marketplace goals let alone transform health care across the world, as Holmes so grandly claimed. How were so many people swindled by this charlatan? That's never directly answered, but the sense is that she played into and up to a narrative that the media and the public were eager to buy: A successful, brilliant, young, female, entrepreneur who had a passion for an idea (she was born for the age of Ted Talks); she compared herself with Edison (hence, the title of the documentary) and Steve Jobs, and she shrugged off the many failures as the obstacles that true visionaries must face and overcome.  Gibney got access to many videos of company staff meetings, which she ran like music videos/pep rallies, plus interviews with many duped company employees, stockholders ("worth" $400M at one point, co went bankrupt), and journalists all make the movie; there are plenty of clips of the media hungry Holmes, though - currently under indictment - she obviously did not cooperate with Gibney. The one flaw in the documentary, in my view, is that there is virtually nothing about her childhood, education, and family background - a big gap. Also it's worth noting that this doc covers much the same ground as the recent pod cast The Dropout, and both must draw on Bad Blood, by WSJ reporter John Carreyrou, who broke the story of this fraud.