Up at 4am, meditating by 4.15: apart from all the money, why would anyone envy Elizabeth Holmes? | Arwa Mahdawi

The Theranos founder's fraud trial reminds us how obsessed Silicon Valley used to be with productivity. But has the pandemic changed things for the better?

Everyone is just winging it. That's one of the most valuable things I've learned as I've gotten older, but not particularly wiser: it doesn't matter how successful or grown-up someone appears on the surface, deep down they are desperately winging it and hoping nobody notices.

Some of us, of course, are winging it rather more than others. Exhibit one being Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of the health tech company Theranos, who is on trial for fraud in California. Everyone is now well aware that Holmes wasn't the visionary she pretended to be, but the gap between Holmes-the-human and Holmes-the-brand can still be jarring. During her testimony last week, for example, Holmes presented a set of note cards on which she had scribbled a daily schedule, written during her early days at Theranos, that is disturbingly reminiscent of Patrick Bateman's opening monologue in American Psycho. You remember that?