Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

Yet Sunny didn’t see himself as lucky. In his mind, he was a gifted businessman and the Commerce One windfall was a validation of his talent. When Elizabeth met him a few years later, she had no reason to question that. She was an impressionable eighteen-year-old girl who saw in Sunny what she wanted to become: a successful and wealthy entrepreneur. He became her mentor, the person who would teach her about business in Silicon Valley.

The way Sunny dressed was also meant to telegraph affluence, though not necessarily taste. He wore white designer shirts with puffy sleeves, acid-washed jeans, and blue Gucci loafers. His shirts’ top three buttons were always undone, causing his chest hair to spill out and revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. A pungent scent of cologne emanated from him at all times. Combined with the flashy cars, the overall impression was of someone heading out to a nightclub rather than to the office.

Getting authorization to use an experimental medical device in a foreign country is usually no easy thing, but Elizabeth was able to leverage the family connections of a wealthy Mexican student at Stanford.

Elizabeth scheduled the meetings on Wednesdays after learning that Apple’s creative meetings with the agency had always been on that day of the week. She told Patrick she admired the simplicity of Apple’s brand message and wanted to emulate it.

I now suspected Theranos had had both of us under continuous surveillance for a year. And, more than likely, Erika Cheung and Alan Beam too.

“I suppose we step back and we look at this and we think, what is the pathology of fraud? Is it the inability or the refusal to accept responsibility or express contrition in any way? Now perhaps that is the cautionary tale that will go forward from this case.”