one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it. Blickman didn’t return with it until late in the day. In the meantime, work at the company came to a standstill as Elizabeth and Sunny moped around the office, consumed by the hunt for the Apple flag.
Greg had been aware of Elizabeth’s fascination with Jobs. She referred to him as “Steve” as if they were close friends. At one point, she’d told him that a documentary espousing a 9/11 conspiracy theory wouldn’t have been available on iTunes if “Steve” hadn’t believed there was something to it. Greg thought that was silly. He was pretty sure Jobs hadn’t personally screened all the movies for rent or sale on iTunes. Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being.
A month or two after Jobs’s death, some of Greg’s colleagues in the engineering department began to notice that Elizabeth was borrowing behaviors and management techniques described in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder. They were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating. Elizabeth even gave the miniLab a Jobs-inspired code name: the 4S. It was a reference to the iPhone 4S, which Apple had coincidentally unveiled the day before Jobs passed away.
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GREG’S HONEYMOON PERIOD at Theranos ended when his sister applied for a job at the company. After interviewing with both Elizabeth and Sunny in April 2011, she received an offer to join the product management team the following month but decided to turn it down and stay with her employer, the accounting firm PwC. The next day, a Saturday, Greg was at the office working. Elizabeth was there too but wouldn’t acknowledge his presence, which he found odd since she usually made a point to, especially on weekends. The following week, Greg stopped being invited to her brainstorming sessions with Kent. It dawned on him that she’d taken his sister’s decision personally and that he was now paying the price for it.
Not long after, a chill descended on Kent’s own relationship with Elizabeth. For all intents and purposes, Kent was the chief architect of the miniLab. A talented engineer who loved to build stuff, he was also dabbling with a side project in his spare time: bicycle lights that lit up both wheels and the road, providing improved visibility and safety for the rider at night. He’d pitched the concept on Kickstarter and, much to his surprise, was able to raise $215,000 in forty-five days. It was the seventh-largest sum raised on the crowdfunding platform that year. What had been a hobby suddenly looked like it could become a viable business.
Kent told Elizabeth about his successful Kickstarter campaign, thinking she wouldn’t mind. But he badly miscalculated: she and Sunny were furious. They viewed it as a major conflict of interest and asked him to transfer his bike-lights patent to Theranos. The paperwork Kent had signed when he joined the company entitled them to any intellectual property he produced while employed there, they contended. Kent disagreed. He’d worked on his little venture during his free time and felt he had done nothing wrong. He also failed to see how a new type of bicycle light posed a threat to a maker of blood-testing equipment. But Elizabeth and Sunny wouldn’t let it go. In meeting after meeting, they tried to get him to turn over the patent. They ratcheted up the pressure by bringing Theranos’s new senior counsel, David Doyle, to some of the meetings.
As he watched the standoff unfold, Greg became convinced that it wasn’t so much about the patent as it was about punishing Kent for his perceived disloyalty. Elizabeth expected her employees to give their all to Theranos, especially ones like Kent whom she entrusted with big responsibilities. Not only had Kent not given his all, he’d devoted part of his time and energy to another engineering project. It explained why he hadn’t been coming in on weekends like she wanted him to. As she saw it, Kent had betrayed her. In the end, a fragile compromise was reached: Kent would go on a leave of absence to give his bicycle-light venture a shot. When he was done indulging his pet project, they’d have a conversation about whether, and under what conditions, he could