Chris Holmes made sure to school his daughter not just in the outsized success of its older generations but also in the failings of its younger ones. Both his father and grandfather had lived large but flawed lives, cycling through marriages and struggling with alcoholism. Chris blamed them for squandering the family fortune. “I grew up with those stories about greatness,” Elizabeth would tell The New Yorker in an interview years later, “and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on character and quality of life.”
She slept four hours a night and popped chocolate-coated coffee beans throughout the day to inject herself with caffeine.
TO BLOW OFF STEAM, Ed went out for beers with Shaunak on Friday evenings at a raucous sports bar called the Old Pro in Palo Alto.
People in her entourage like Channing Robertson and Don Lucas were beginning to compare her to Steve Jobs. If so, she should dress the part, she told her. Elizabeth took the suggestion to heart. From that point on, she came to work in a black turtleneck and black slacks most days.
Tim was a yes-man who never leveled with Elizabeth about what was feasible and what wasn’t. For instance, he’d contradicted Justin and assured her they could write the Edison software’s user interface faster in Flash than in JavaScript. The very next morning, Justin had spotted a Learn Flash book on his desk.
he recommended two management self-help books to her, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t and Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work, and included their links on Amazon.com.
With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Sunny off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than five hundred words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails.
While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.
We continued going around in circles, never getting a straight answer about how many tests Theranos performed on the Edison versus commercial analyzers. It was frustrating but also a sign that I was on the right track. They wouldn’t be stonewalling if they had nothing to hide.
Holmes had had three private meetings with Murdoch. The latest had taken place earlier that month, when she’d hosted him in Palo Alto and showed him the miniLab. During the visit, she’d raised my story, telling him the information I had gathered was false and would do great damage to Theranos if it was published. Murdoch had demurred, saying he trusted the paper’s editors to handle the matter fairly.
Most of the other investors opted against litigation, settling instead for a grant of extra shares in exchange for a promise not to sue. One notable exception was Rupert Murdoch. The media mogul sold his stock back to Theranos for one dollar so he could claim a big tax write-off on his other earnings. With a fortune estimated at $12 billion, Murdoch could afford to lose more than $100 million on a bad investment.