Persephone Odair is a female character introduced in Season 35, Episode 4: Thirst Trap: A Corporate Love Story. She is the creator of a product called LifeBoat, a device she claimed able to turn saltwater into fresh drinking water. Through vigorously pitching this product to Mr. Burns, he eventually partnered with her to find the company-Lifeboat. However, after her genius invention was discovered to be a scam, she was criminally charged and imprisoned as well as divorced from Mr. Burns, with her company becoming defunct. Odair was voiced by Elizabeth Banks and inspired of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos.
Backstory[]
According to the documentary about her in the episode, Persephone Odair was a genius child with a dream to change the world. As a teenager, she tried to clone Sheryl Sandberg for a school project. Later, Persephone was accepted into Harvard University but dropped out before she even entered the school gates, driving past them instead. A decision which was influenced by Bill Gates, who also dropped out of Harvard University to focus on building Microsoft.
Persephone's ambition to create Lifeboat stemmed from a story of her grandfather who during World War 2, had his ship bombed, leaving him alone on a lifeboat, desolated at sea, where he eventually died of thirst. It is later on revealed that he was actually a CPA who fixes British spellings on Wikipedia. She made the product and advertised it, which caught the public's attention, during an interview with Lisa Simpson, she would find out that Mr. Burns was the only Billionaire in Springfield who gave Odair an idea to pitch her product and business plan to him. She participated in a talk with the leader of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, where she voiced her desire for him to fund her product- a desalination device which could turn any saltwater into clean water, however Burns was not impressed, instead taking more interest in another invention. Nonetheless, Persephone would continuously bombard Mr. Burns, asking him to work with her as well as flattering him, eventually he would give in to Persephone's demands, and became her business partner, he decided to set up Lifeboat's headquarters for her near the Nuclear Powerplant. Thanks to Mr. Burns, Persephone would buy hundreds of cans of Sops- a soft drink originally released in the 1970's that quickly fell out of the public's favor due to its overly sweet and artificial taste and put these into the Lifeboat device to mask the salty taste of the water, the lifeboat actually not being able to purify the saltwater. This, however, was kept a secret from the masses. Lifeboat's headquarters grew to be a sophisticated workplace with advanced technology; however, the workers were forced to sign an NDA where they could not tell outsiders about their job.
