Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

by John Carreyrou

The quote read, “You start to realize you are looking in the eyes of another Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.”

“We can’t not pursue this,” he said. “We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.”

Like most people, Greg had been taken aback by Elizabeth’s deep voice when he’d first met her. He soon began to suspect it was affected. One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual. In her excitement, she seemed to have momentarily forgotten to turn on the baritone. When Greg thought about it, there was a certain logic to her act: Silicon Valley was overwhelmingly a man’s world.

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.

Elizabeth scheduled the meetings on Wednesdays after learning that Apple’s creative meetings with the agency had always been that day of the week.

Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.

Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate. “I’d be less surprised if they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-seventh century than if they told us they cracked that nut,” he said.