matters.”
Ed didn’t think she meant it to sound as callous as it did. But she was so laser focused on achieving her goals that she seemed oblivious to the practical implications of her decisions. Ed had noticed a quote on her desk cut out from a recent press article about Theranos. It was from Channing Robertson, the Stanford professor who was on the company’s board.
The quote read, “You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”
That was a high bar to set for herself, Ed thought. Then again, if there was anyone who could clear it, it might just be this young woman. Ed had never encountered anyone as driven and relentless. She slept four hours a night and popped chocolate-coated coffee beans throughout the day to inject herself with caffeine. He tried to tell her to get more sleep and to live a healthier lifestyle, but she brushed him off.
As obstinate as Elizabeth was, Ed knew there was one person who had her ear: a mysterious man named Sunny. Elizabeth had dropped his name enough times that Ed had gleaned some basic facts about him: he was Indian, he was older than Elizabeth, and they were a couple. The story was that Sunny had made a fortune from the sale of an internet company he’d cofounded in the late 1990s.
Sunny wasn’t a visible presence at Theranos but he seemed to loom large in Elizabeth’s life. At the company Christmas party in a Palo Alto restaurant in late 2006, Elizabeth got too tipsy to go home on her own, so she called Sunny and asked him to come pick her up. That’s when Ed learned that they were living together in a condo a few blocks away.
Sunny wasn’t the only older man giving Elizabeth advice. She had brunch with Don Lucas every Sunday at his home in Atherton, the ultrawealthy enclave north of Palo Alto. Larry Ellison, whom she’d met through Lucas, was also an influence. Lucas and Ellison had both invested in Theranos’s second funding round, which in Silicon Valley parlance was known as a “Series B” round. Ellison sometimes dropped by in his red Porsche to check on his investment. It wasn’t uncommon to hear Elizabeth start a sentence with “Larry says.”
Ellison might be one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of some $25 billion, but he wasn’t necessarily the ideal role model. In Oracle’s early years, he had famously exaggerated his database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling with bugs. That’s not something you could do with a medical device.
It was hard to know how much Elizabeth’s approach to running Theranos was her own and how much she was channeling Ellison, Lucas, or Sunny, but one thing was clear: she wasn’t happy when Ed refused to make his engineering group run 24/7. From that moment on, their relationship cooled.
Before long, Ed noticed that Elizabeth was making new engineering hires, but she wasn’t having them report to him. They formed a separate group. A rival group. It dawned on him that she was pitting his engineering team and the new team against each other in some corporate version of survival of the fittest.
Ed didn’t have time to dwell on it too much because there was something else he had to deal with: Elizabeth had convinced Pfizer to try out the Theranos system in a pilot project in Tennessee. Under the agreement, Theranos 1.0 units were going to be placed in people’s homes and patients were going to test their blood with them every day. The results would be sent wirelessly to Theranos’s office in California, where they would be analyzed and then forwarded to Pfizer. They had to somehow fix all the problems before the study started. She’d already scheduled a trip to Tennessee to begin training some of the patients and doctors in how to use the system.
In early August 2007, Ed accompanied Elizabeth to Nashville. Sunny picked them up from the office in his Porsche and drove them to the airport. It was the first time Ed met him in person. The extent of their age gap suddenly became apparent. Sunny looked to be in his early forties, nearly twenty years older than Elizabeth. There was also a cold, businesslike dynamic to their relationship. When they parted at the airport, Sunny didn’t say “Goodbye” or “Have a nice trip.” Instead, he barked, “Now go make some money!”
When they got