How Accurate Is “The Dropout”? What's Real and What's Not

From Holmes’s obsession with Steve Jobs and Yoda quotations to her signature messy bun and her probably-fake baritone voice, much of Holmes’s personality is depicted accurately in the show, especially in scenes where Holmes is dancing alone to her iPod, staring longingly at the poster of Steve Jobs in her bedroom, quoting Yoda, or practising her lower voice in the mirror. So the answer is, yes, Holmes was a big fan of Steve Jobs, mirroring many of his strategies for success and daily life practices in her own life.

While studying at Stanford, Holmes developed a patent for a wearable patch that would diagnose health conditions and inject antibiotics into patients through their skin. This came before her experiments with blood testing, so Theranos and developing the Edison machine wasn’t her original business plan.

Her original biotech company name also wasn’t Theranos. According to “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” Holmes called the business Real-Time Cures first, and the name Theranos (combining “therapy” and “diagnosis”) came later when she realised people were sceptical of the word “cure.”

“The Dropout” does include mentions of Holmes’s patch, but does not mention Real-Time Cures.

Holmes’s first meeting with Stanford professor Dr. Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf) at the recommendation of Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin) in “The Dropout” did actually happen in real life, and it went just as badly. Gardner flat-out told Holmes her idea for an arm patch that would dispense medicine through the skin was medically impossible.

While the show does a good job of portraying Gardner’s unimpressed reaction to Holmes’s med-tech ideas and frustration with her hubris, there’s no reason to believe the scene where Holmes chases Gardner out to her car after being shut down happened in real life. “She just stared through me,” Gardner told the BBC in a January 2022 interview. “And she just seemed absolutely confident of her own brilliance. She wasn’t interested in my expertise and it was upsetting.”

The complicated love story between Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (played by Naveen Andrews in “The Dropout”) is probably one of the most known facts about the Theranos scandal. The beginning of their 12-year relationship begins when Holmes met Balwani during an immersion program in Beijing, China, when she was 18 and he was 37.

“The Dropout” accurately shows their relationship evolve from a friendship to romance, but unlike in “The Dropout,” it wasn’t Holmes’s first time in Beijing. According to “Bad Blood” (via Parade), Holmes spent at least three high school summers participating in the Mandarin program. Holmes met Balwani the last summer before her first semester at Stanford, at which point she was struggling with being bullied, and Balwani became her only friend.

“The Dropout” also doesn’t acknowledge that Balwani was previously married to a Japanese artist named Keiko Fujimoto when he met Holmes in 2002. Balwani and Fujimoto divorced at the end of that year, but Holmes likely didn’t play a role in their decision to split, since Fujimoto filed for divorce in February 2002 before Balwani even met Holmes that summer.

As Theranos investors like Don Lucas (Michael Ironside) began to question Holmes’s credibility and attempted to fire her, the third episode of “The Dropout” sees Holmes claim she has a $20 million investment for Theranos – but only if she’s kept on as CEO and the investor is brought on as COO. The board doesn’t know the investment is from Balwani until much later.

While Balwani really did give Theranos a loan, it was a little less in real life. In the second episode of “The Dropout” podcast, it’s revealed in court testimony from Balwani that the sum of his loan was $13 million.

Getting into business with retail stores like Walgreens was a pivotal point in the Theranos timeline, and “The Dropout” does a good job of portraying this business transaction true to life. Walgreens Vice President of Health Innovations Jay Rosan (Alan Ruck) leads the plans to implement “wellness centers” with blood-testing machines into stores by 2013. Dr. J (as he preferred to be called) convinces Wade Maquelon (John Pais), who hires consultant Kevin Hunter (Rich Sommer) to vet the Theranos labs in order to move forward with the deal.

True to real-life, the trio never saw the labs (because Theranos kept making excuses), and “The Dropout” podcast includes recollections everything from Walgreens executives of Balwani following Hunter to the bathroom and the awkward sushi lunch meeting, to the strange karaoke tribute from Walgreens execs. Although, according to Vanity Fair, the Walgreens team actually adapted John Lennon’s “Imagine” lyrics, not “What I Like About You” by The Romantics as they did in the show.

The show’s name alone confirms Holmes dropped out of Stanford, where she was a President’s Scholar and received high praise from some of her peers and professors. Like in the show, Holmes asked her parents to invest her tuition into helping her get Theranos off the ground. All of this is shown in “The Dropout,” but the first episode gives viewers a more personal reason behind her decision.

After attending a late-night college party in an effort to fit in and later lying upset in her bed, other college girls speculate outside her room that she was raped. Holmes makes the decision to drop out soon after, telling her mother about the assault.

This aspect of the show is true to life. Holmes reported her sexual assault on Stanford’s campus to the county sheriff’s office in 2003 according to a court document obtained by NPR. It was the same year she was a freshman and the year before she dropped out in 2004. It came to light for the first time in Holmes’s 2021 court testimony, where she said, “I was questioning what-how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I wanted to do with my life. And I decided that I was going to build a life by building this company.”