and the Commerce One windfall was a validation of his talent. When Elizabeth met him a few years later, she had no reason to question that. She was an impressionable eighteen-year-old girl who saw in Sunny what she wanted to become: a successful and wealthy entrepreneur. He became her mentor, the person who would teach her about business in Silicon Valley.
It isn’t clear exactly when Elizabeth and Sunny became romantically involved, but it appears to have been not long after she dropped out of Stanford. When they’d first met in China in the summer of 2002, Sunny was married to a Japanese artist named Keiko Fujimoto and living in San Francisco. By October 2004, he was listed as “a single man” on the deed to a condominium he purchased on Channing Avenue in Palo Alto. Other public records show Elizabeth moved into that apartment in July 2005.
Sunny spent the decade after his brief and lucrative stint at CommerceBid not doing much aside from enjoying his money and giving Elizabeth advice behind the scenes. He had stayed on at Commerce One as a vice president until January 2001 and then enrolled in business school at Berkeley. He later took classes in computer science at Stanford.
By the time he joined Theranos in September 2009, Sunny’s legal record contained at least one red flag. To dodge taxes on his CommerceBid earnings, he’d hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman, which arranged for him to invest in a tax shelter. The maneuver generated an artificial tax loss of $41 million that offset his CommerceBid gains, all but eliminating his tax liability. When the Internal Revenue Service cracked down on the practice in 2004, Sunny was forced to pay the millions of dollars in back taxes he owed in a settlement with the agency. He turned around and sued BDO, claiming that he had been unsophisticated in tax matters and that the firm had knowingly misled him. The suit was settled on undisclosed terms in 2008.
Tax troubles aside, Sunny was proud of his wealth and liked to broadcast it with his cars. He drove a black Lamborghini Gallardo and a black Porsche 911. Both had vanity license plates. The one on the Porsche read “DAZKPTL” in mock reference to Karl Marx’s treatise on capitalism. The Lamborghini’s plate was “VDIVICI,” a play on the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), which Julius Caesar used to describe his quick and decisive victory at the Battle of Zela in a letter to the Roman Senate.
The way Sunny dressed was also meant to telegraph affluence, though not necessarily taste. He wore white designer shirts with puffy sleeves, acid-washed jeans, and blue Gucci loafers. His shirts’ top three buttons were always undone, causing his chest hair to spill out and revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. A pungent scent of cologne emanated from him at all times. Combined with the flashy cars, the overall impression was of someone heading out to a nightclub rather than to the office.
Sunny’s expertise was software and that was where he was supposed to add value at Theranos. In one of the first company meetings he attended, he bragged that he’d written a million lines of code. Some employees thought that was preposterous. Sunny had worked at Microsoft, where teams of software engineers had written the Windows operating system at the rate of one thousand lines of code per year of development. Even if you assumed Sunny was twenty times faster than the Windows developers, it would still have taken him fifty years to do what he claimed.
Sunny was boastful and patronizing toward employees, but he was also strangely elusive at times. When Don Lucas showed up at the office once or twice a month to visit with Elizabeth, Sunny would suddenly vanish. One employee found a note on an office printer that Elizabeth had faxed to Lucas, in which she lauded Sunny’s skills and résumé, so she hadn’t concealed his hiring. But people like Dave Nelson, the engineer who had helped Tony Nugent build the first Edison prototype and who now sat across from Chelsea’s cubicle, began to suspect that Elizabeth was downplaying to the board the breadth of Sunny’s role.
There was also the murky question of what she told the board about their relationship. When Elizabeth informed Tony that Sunny was joining the company, Tony asked her point-blank whether they were still a couple. She responded that the relationship was over. Going forward, it was strictly