When Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone to the world 15 years ago this week, he had several handsets on stage with him. He wasn’t sure they would work: they crashed unless used in a very specific way. They couldn’t connect to wi-fi or a mobile network properly, so they trailed long wire aerials and their displays were doctored to show full mobile signal. None of the handsets could play a song or a video all the way through. It was a huge gamble, but a necessary one: Nokia, Sony, Palm and others were already selling phones as touchscreen computers, music players and cameras. The opportunity Jobs saw was that these devices would be transformative, and that he could be first to sell the story of a company changing the world.
Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted on 4 January for wire fraud and conspiring to commit fraud against investors, was such a committed disciple of Jobs that she impersonated him, wearing the same clothes, decorating her office in the same way, following the same diet and adopting a deeper voice. Like Jobs, she dropped out of university and set up a company. Ten years after she founded her blood-testing start-up, Theranos, she was described by Inc. magazine as “the next Steve Jobs”.
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