them on their work. Sunny didn’t speak or understand a word of Spanish, so Chelsea did all the talking. As the meetings dragged on, Sunny’s face would betray a mixture of annoyance and concern. Chelsea suspected he was worried she was telling the Mexicans that the Theranos system didn’t work. She enjoyed seeing him squirm.
Back in Palo Alto, word around the office was that Elizabeth was negotiating a deal to sell four hundred Edison readers to the Mexican government. The deal was supposed to bring in a much-needed influx of cash. The $15 million Theranos had raised in its first two funding rounds was long gone and the company had already burned through the $32 million Henry Mosley had been instrumental in bringing in during its Series C round in late 2006. The company was being kept afloat with a loan Sunny had personally guaranteed.
Meanwhile, Sunny was also traveling to Thailand to set up another swine flu testing outpost. The epidemic had spread to Asia, and the country was one of the region’s hardest hit with tens of thousands of cases and more than two hundred deaths. But unlike in Mexico, it wasn’t clear that Theranos’s activities in Thailand were sanctioned by local authorities. Rumors were circulating among employees that Sunny’s connections there were shady and that he was paying bribes to obtain blood samples from infected patients. When a colleague of Chelsea’s in the client solutions group named Stefan Hristu quit immediately upon returning from a trip to Thailand with Sunny in January 2010, many took it to mean the rumors were true.
Chelsea was back from Mexico by then and the Thailand gossip spooked her. She knew there was an anti-bribery law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Violating it was a felony that could result in prison time.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE STOPPED to think about it, there were a lot of things that made Chelsea uncomfortable about Theranos. And none more so than Sunny. He spawned a culture of fear with his intimidating behavior. Firings had always been a common occurrence at the company, but in late 2009 and early 2010 it was Sunny who took on the role of hatchet man. Chelsea even learned a new expression: to disappear someone. That’s how employees used the normally intransitive verb when someone was dismissed. “Sunny disappeared him,” they would say, conjuring up the image of a Mafia hit in 1970s Brooklyn.
The scientists, especially, were afraid of Sunny. One of the only ones who stood up to him was Seth Michelson. A few days before Christmas, Seth had gone out and purchased polo shirts for his group. Their color matched the green of the company logo and they had the words “Theranos Biomath” emblazoned on them. Seth thought it was a nice team-building gesture and paid for it out of his own pocket.
When Sunny saw the polos, he got angry. He didn’t like that he hadn’t been consulted and he argued that Seth’s gift to his team made the other managers look bad. Earlier in his career, Seth had worked at Roche, the big Swiss drugmaker, where he’d been in charge of seventy people and an annual budget of $25 million. He decided he wasn’t going to let Sunny lecture him about management. He pushed back and they got into a yelling match.
After that, Sunny seemed to have it in for Seth and frequently harassed him, which led Seth to look for another job. He found one a few months later at a company based in Redwood City called Genomic Health and walked into Elizabeth’s office, resignation letter in hand, to give his notice. Sunny, who was there, opened up the letter, read it, then threw it back in Seth’s face.
“I won’t accept this!” he shouted.
Seth shouted back, deadpan, “I have news for you, sir: in 1863, President Lincoln freed the slaves.”
Sunny’s response was to throw him out of the building. It was weeks before Seth was able to retrieve his math books, scientific journals, and the pictures of his wife on his desk. He had to enlist the company’s new lawyer, Jodi Sutton, and a security guard to help him pack his things late on a weeknight when Sunny wasn’t around.
Sunny also got into it with Tony Nugent one Friday evening. He’d been giving direct orders and putting intense pressure on a young engineer on Tony’s team, causing him to fall apart from the stress. Tony confronted Sunny about it and their argument quickly escalated. Working himself