into a fury, Sunny yelled that he was doing everyone a favor by volunteering his time to the company and people should be a little more appreciative.
“I’ve made enough money to look after my family for seven generations. I don’t need to be here!” he screamed in Tony’s face.
Tony roared back in his Irish brogue, “I don’t have a cent and I don’t need to be here either!”
Elizabeth had to step in to defuse the situation. Dave Nelson thought that Tony would be fired and that he’d have a new boss by Monday morning. Yet Tony somehow survived the confrontation.
Chelsea tried to complain to Elizabeth about Sunny, but she couldn’t get through to her. Their bond seemed too strong to be shaken. Whenever Elizabeth came out of her office, which was separated from Sunny’s by a glass conference room, he would immediately pop out of his and walk with her. Often, he accompanied her all the way to the bathrooms in the back of the building, prompting some employees to wonder half jokingly if they were snorting lines of cocaine back there.
By February 2010, after six months on the job, Chelsea had lost all her enthusiasm for working at Theranos and was thinking of quitting. She hated Sunny. The Mexico and Thailand projects seemed to be losing steam as the swine flu pandemic subsided. The company was lurching from one ill-conceived initiative to another like a child with attention deficit disorder. On top of it all, Chelsea’s boyfriend lived in Los Angeles and she was flying back and forth between L.A. and the Bay Area every weekend to see him. The commute was killing her.
As she debated what to do, something happened that hastened her decision. One day, the Stanford student whose family connections Elizabeth had tapped in Mexico came by with his father. Chelsea wasn’t there to witness the visit, but the office was buzzing about it afterward. The father was going through some sort of cancer scare. Upon hearing of his health worries, Elizabeth and Sunny had convinced him to let Theranos test his blood for cancer biomarkers. Tony Nugent, who wasn’t there for the encounter either, heard about it later that day from Gary Frenzel.
“Well, that was interesting,” Gary told Tony, his voice conveying bewilderment. “We played doctor today.”
Chelsea was appalled. The validation study in Belgium and the experiments in Mexico and Thailand were one thing. Those were supposed to be for research purposes only and to have no bearing on the way patients were treated. But encouraging someone to rely on a Theranos blood test to make an important medical decision was something else altogether. Chelsea found it reckless and irresponsible.
She became further alarmed when not long afterward Sunny and Elizabeth began circulating copies of the requisition forms doctors used to order blood tests from laboratories and speaking excitedly about the great opportunities that lay in consumer testing.
I’m done, Chelsea thought to herself. This has crossed too many lines.
She approached Elizabeth and told her she wanted to resign but decided to keep her qualms to herself. Instead, she told her friend that her weekend commutes were taking too great a toll and that she wanted to move to Los Angeles full-time, which in any case was true. She offered to stay on for a transition period, but Elizabeth and Sunny didn’t want her to. If Chelsea was leaving, better she do so right away, they told her. They asked her not to say anything to the three employees who reported to her on her way out. Chelsea protested. It didn’t feel right to flee like a thief in the middle of the night. But Sunny and Elizabeth were firm: she was not to speak to them.
Chelsea walked out of the building and into the Palo Alto sunshine with conflicting emotions. The dominant one was relief. But she also felt bad that she hadn’t been able to say goodbye to her team and to tell them why she was leaving. She would have given them the official reason—that she was moving to L.A.—but Sunny and Elizabeth hadn’t trusted her to do that. They’d wanted to control the narrative of her departure.
Chelsea also worried about Elizabeth. In her relentless drive to be a successful startup founder, she had built a bubble around herself that was cutting her off from reality. And the only person she was letting inside was a terrible influence. How could her friend not see that?
| SEVEN |
Dr. J
As the calendar turned from