At the moment I’m struggling with an Elizabeth Holmes obsession. No, not that kind of obsession. Rather the kind that can not understand how people like Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, nutjob Amway heiress Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Communications, the Waltons of WalMart, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, super-lawyer David Boies were conned by a twenty-something blonde with a weird voice who never blinked.

The story Holmes is all over the place at the moment. There’s a podcast, “The Dropout”, an HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by Alex Gibney,  the book most of this is based on, “Bad Blood”, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyou and soon … a Hollywood movie with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, (to be directed by Adam McKay of “The Big Short” and “Vice”.)

Reduced to its most basic, Holmes claimed to have created a home espresso-size machine that could take a blood sample from a pinprick and run 200 analyses pretty much while you waited. Tapping the above-mentioned luminaries and more, she pocketed $900 million in investments, set up shop in Silicon Valley, hired dozens of employees, (as many marketing and branding gurus as scientists and engineers), and began building the intense cover-gal cult of blonde and blue-eyed Elizabeth … i.e. the long-awaited female Steve Jobs.

Everything about Holmes and her company, Theranos, is now in ruin. The $900 million is gone — $300 million to lawyers she was once paying at the rate of $1 million a month — and Holmes is facing charges of criminal fraud that could toss her in jail for 20 years. (Although, given what’s happened with Paul Manafort, she too may get off with probation for her “otherwise blameless life.”)

My copy of “Bad Blood” just arrived. But I watched Gibney’s doc, listened to a couple of hours of the podcast and inhaled a half-dozen Vanity Fair-like features. It’s an amazing, Hollywood-worthy story. (And the lead character is blonde!) But even after all that, I’m still left asking, “How?”

How did major league figures like Shultz, Kissinger, Boies, Slim, Murdoch and others buy into this con? Murdoch in particular invested $120 million. (DeVos was good for $100 million. Shultz, Kissinger and Boies were board members.)  On what possible basis?

I used to assume that before a canny old bastard like Murdoch threw down as much as a 20% tip he’d made damn sure he got everything and more than he was paying for. As in, for example, the best scientist-engineers he could find, with orders to Holmes that they were coming into her lab to verify that the machine — which she named “Edison”, after you know who — actually worked, or at the very least that there was bona fide science showing the concept was doable.

Clearly, none of that happened.

Being a wretched cynic and part-time pervert, my first theory was that the weird but-still-sort-of-attractive blonde was “encouraging” the old dogs with private, Robert Kraft-like consultations, even though at their age you’d worry that Shultz and Kissinger might have a stroke at the mere thought of it.

But apparently that isn’t true, either. The best explanation to date of this stunning gullibility on the part of some of the absolute lions of Spy vs Spy vs Spy insider diplomacy, international investment and skullduggery is that … she won them over, and kept them won over despite mounting evidence of fraud, purely on the basis of her family pedigree and Jobs-inspired bullshit.

In her family history there is a genuine medical hero, with a hospital named after him in Cincinnati and then there were her D.C.-based parents/power couple. (Her father was for a time — wait for it — an executive at Enron.) Somehow, maybe because when you get to a certain status in life you get lazy and place more value and trust in the pedigrees of who you know than real-time due diligence, the Shultzs, Kissingers, Boies, Waltons and Murdochs lent their name, reputation and money based on social association instead of gimlet-eyed investigation.

All to a con that on the face of it seemed far too good to be true.

Not that I worry for a second about any of them, you understand. It’s just that if these types of people — Harvey Weinstein’s go-to-guy Boies in particular sticks in my mind — are so judgmentally sloppy and easily deluded by a character like Holmes how can they purport to have any credibility on any other subject?

Part of the explanation for their immunity from shame and reputational disgrace is of course that most of them have their own media offices and control their own press. Stories such as this are fascinating because they are so rarely revealed to the public, much less so widely disseminated.

Still, not one of them hired an actual expert to find out if there was anything behind the bullshit … coming from the dropout child of pedigreed parents?

The revolution can’t come soon enough.