Elizabeth Holmes was the least charismatic person imaginable

PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO HURT OTHERS to get what they want often have the most charisma.

I was talking to an actor at a party once when Harvey Weinstein walked past. He shot the actor a look, pointed at him and just said, “You’re next.” It was an arrogant and mysterious thing to do. In person Donald Trump exudes a fascinatingly frantic self-pity.

At the extremes, I found Ted Kaczynski interestingly analytical. The head of the Taliban’s murder and torture department was described to me as courtly wisdom personified. When Carl Jung met Benito Mussolini, he observed that Mussolini was charming, original and tasteful. George Orwell found Adolf Hitler strangely likeable.

I was expecting some similar broken appeal from Elizabeth Holmes. (Though of course her sins are of a smaller scale.) I wanted to be seduced. Drawn in. Bewitched, as so many aging male luminaries had been. But she was the least charismatic human being I have ever met. (The only person I can compare her to was a man I kept running into on a vacation, who wanted to talk at length about his work selling catering equipment to retirement homes in North Carolina.)

Since I met her I’ve been unable to reconcile that person with the public figure who sparked billion-dollar companies, sensational collapses, hit movies, and frantic debate. Who seems poised, even, to attempt a second act.

So when I ran into Spencer Greenberg, a psychological researcher who has studied a large quantity of cults in order to identify their commonalities, I asked if he had any views on the matter. He did.

Usually, I disdain neat, scientific-seeming generalities about people. Yes, we’re surely mammals, and none of us is unique. But I believe it takes a story, or a painting, or a poem or a song to even begin to explore the nature of that experience.

Greenberg won me over because his findings were very reasonable. And, frankly, because they so closely matched my experience inside Theranos. He told me that “it’s extremely common that people meet cult leaders and don’t find them charismatic.” Often, he said, it’s a matter of personal preference, or our relationship to the difficult people in our own lives.

Cult leaders project total confidence, he said. Some people like that, some people don’t. To me, sitting around a conference table, Holmes’s blithe insistence that Theranos had no real problems seemed brittle and delusional. But others who had not read skeptical reporting before meeting her might find it reassuring.

They also tend to have others generate an aura for them, he said. They’ll be talked up, or referred to, or seen as, brilliant beyond the ordinary. It’s much more effective for others to do this (although he pointed out that L. Ron Hubbard had been known to compare Scientology to the invention of the wheel). I thought of the conference rooms at Theranos named after Jonas Salk and Isaac Newton, and the strange breathless tone with which she was referred to by her staff.

They then tend to be extremely present — to offer an enormous focus on whoever they are with. Given that this is a leader, spoken of with such reverence, that person tends to feel flattered by it. That explains the story I kept being told about a nice time her PR people had had with her at a restaurant, or the excitement I was expected to feel when she joined a phone call. To me, enjoying dinner or talking to someone on the phone is a default. For her staff it was evidence that this special person had made focused time for them.

I was curious how he defined the character of a person who would engineer this circumstance. “They’re not truly confident,” he said. “They’re deeply in need of feeling good about themselves and they construct this reality where they can. They get extremely angry if anyone threatens that.”

The underlying difference, he said, is that most of us (whether we would admit it or not) would hurt someone else to an arbitrary value of one if we could gain a value of three. But people who end up in those positions, he said, would hurt another 100 to gain one. ■