(spoilers) far be it from me to disagree with john carreyrou about elizabeth holmes but i disagree with his read of two scenes (seriously, spoilers) --- i think liz is telling the truth in the who's on first scene. she really truly does not get it. a funny kind of double empathy problem; liz does not possess the theory of mind necessary to understand the joke, and carreyrou does not possess the theory of mind necessary to understand how liz can possibly not possess the theory of mind necessary to understand the joke people who are both intelligent and neurodivergent can end up as adults with really weird deficits that they compensate for with intelligence, in a way that more normal people can't, and that feels intuitively wrong because you're like "how did you manage to found theranos and still have this crazy deficit" but that's backwards, it's exactly because she was the sort of person who could found theranos that she's also the sort of person who could get away with having this kind of deficit similarly i disagree with carreyrou's read of the photography studio scene but this one is less interesting to me. i don't think it's productive to think in terms of whether liz craves the spotlight or not. what she clearly craves is a sense of mission, and she liked the spotlight when it felt aligned with her mission and doesn't like it when it isn't