Interestingly you won't find this for well connected white males.
Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.
Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.
In the Holmes case, she was visibly celebrated for being a young female (as a positive) so it's not shocking that it flipped to a negative on people's mind when she was proven to be a fraud.
In the case of SBF, he wasn't celebrated for being male. But he was notable for his association with "effective altruism". Has the reputation of the EA community been adversely affected by his downfall? Absolutely. So that's the more part analogy here.
Did Holmes create the "I'm an amazing FEMALE entrepreneur" persona? Or was she focused on the scam and the narrative was created around her?
A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.
No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.