2011 when Elizabeth hired her younger brother, Christian, as associate director of product management. Christian Holmes was two years out of college and had no clear qualifications to work at a blood diagnostics company, but that mattered little to Elizabeth. What mattered far more was that her brother was someone she could trust.
Christian was a handsome young man with eyes the same deep shade of blue as his sister’s, but that was where the similarities between them began and ended. Christian had none of his sister’s ambition and drive; he was a regular guy who liked to watch sports, chase girls, and party with friends. After graduating from Duke University in 2009, he’d worked as an analyst at a Washington, D.C., firm that advised corporations about best practices.
When he first arrived at the company, Christian didn’t have much to do, so he spent part of his days reading about sports. He hid it by cutting and pasting articles from the ESPN website into empty emails so that, from afar, it looked like he was absorbed in work-related correspondence. Christian soon recruited four of his fraternity brothers from Duke: Jeff Blickman, Nick Menchel, Dan Edlin, and Sani Hadziahmetovic. They were later joined by a fifth Duke friend, Max Fosque. They rented a house together near the Palo Alto country club and became known inside Theranos as “the Frat Pack.” Like Christian, none of the other Duke boys had any experience or training relevant to blood testing or medical devices, but their friendship with Elizabeth’s brother vaulted them above most other employees in the company hierarchy.
By then, Greg had convinced several of his own friends to join Theranos. Two of them were buddies from his undergraduate days at Georgia Tech, Jordan Carr and Ted Pasco. The third was a friend he’d made in Pasadena while working for NASA named Trey Howard. Trey happened to have gone to college at Duke a few years before the Frat Pack.
Jordan, Trey, and Ted were all assigned to the product management group with Christian and his friends, but they weren’t granted the same level of access to sensitive information. Many of the hush-hush meetings Elizabeth and Sunny held to strategize about the Walgreens and Safeway partnerships were off limits to them, whereas Christian and his fraternity brothers were invited in.
The Frat Pack endeared itself to Sunny and Elizabeth by working long days. Sunny was constantly questioning employees’ commitment to the company—the number of hours a person put in at the office, whether he or she was doing productive work or not, was his ultimate gauge of that commitment. At times, he would sit in the big glass conference room and stare out at the rows of cubicles trying to identify who was slacking off.
The numerous late nights they spent at the office left no time for exercise, so Christian and his friends snuck workouts in during the day. To elude Sunny’s watchful gaze, they ducked out of the building at different times using different exits. They were also careful never to return at the same time or together. Ted Pasco, who had left a career on Wall Street to try his luck in Silicon Valley but didn’t have any clear duties during his first few months at Theranos, amused himself by timing their exits and entries.
Several members of the Frat Pack joined Greg and two of his colleagues from the engineering department for lunch on the big terrace overlooking the parking lot one day. A discussion about the low IQs of some of the world’s top soccer players led them to debate the question, Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid- to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things.
Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had