At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.
Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.
Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.
I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.
It's actually very common for women professionals to use a lower register when speaking to colleagues. People take them more seriously; they notice. I have several friends who do this.
I read that book. I came across that Boies fellow at other times, too. SCO vs IBM. But also while reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (about Harvey Weinstein).
Psychopathy is not limited to serial killers. Psychopathy is prevalent in about 1 in 100. If 1/100 people were serial killers, we'd have a big problem on our hands.
In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.
Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population.
The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
I imagine we do hear about more such cases because there simply are more of them compared to other groups we hear about.
There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.
I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.
Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.