Fiona’s Reviews > Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup > Status Update

In March, a month after I had started digging into the company, Theranos had closed another round of funding. Unbeknownst to me, the lead investor was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born media mogul who controlled the Journal’s parent company, News Corporation. Of the more than $430 million Theranos had raised in this last round, $125 million had come from Murdoch. That made him the company’s biggest investor.

Holmes and Balwani wanted to impress the vice president with a vision of a cutting-edge, completely automated laboratory. So instead of showing him the actual lab, they created a fake one. The made the microbiology team vacate a third, smaller room, had it repainted, and lined its walls with rows of miniLabs stacked up on metal shelves.

Elizabeth was also quick to embrace the trappings of fame. The Theranos security team grew to twenty people. Two bodyguards now drove her around in a black Audi A8 sedan. Their code name for her was “Eagle One.” (Sunny was “Eagle Two.”) The Audi had no license plates—another nod to Steve Jobs, who used to lease a new Mercedes every six months to avoid having plates.

She tried to talk sense into Elizabeth and Daniel Young by emailing them Edison data from Theranos’s last study with a pharmaceutical company—Celgene—which dated back to 2010. In that study, Theranos had used Edison to track inflammatory markers in the blood of patients who had asthma. The data had shown an unacceptably high error rate, causing Celgene to end the companies’ collaboration. Nothing had changed

Sam would reply that the Piccolo could perform only one class of blood test, general chemistry assays. (Unlike immunoassays, which measure a substance in the blood by using antibodies that bind to the substance, general chemistry aasays rely on other chemical principles such as light absorbance or electrical signal changes.) Elizabeth wanted a machine that was more versatile, he'd remind Kyle.

Elizabeth’s loose relationship with the truth was another point of contention. Ian had heard her tell outright lies more than once and, after five years of working with her, he no longer trusted anything she said, especially when she made representations to employees or outsiders about the readiness of the company’s technology.

He was reminded of an old saying: “When you strike at the king, you must kill him.” Todd Surdey and Michael Esquivel had struck at the king, or rather the queen. But she’d survived.

The queen didn’t waste any time putting down the rebellion. Elizabeth fired Surdey first and Esquivel a few weeks later.

Ana joined Theranos as its chief design architect. This mostly meant she was responsible for the overall look and feel of the Edison. Elizabeth wanted a software touchscreen similar to the iPhone’s and a sleek outer case for the machine. The case, she decreed, should have two colours separated by a diagonal cut, like the original iMac. But unlike that first iMac, it couldn’t be translucent.

To anyone who spent time with Elizabeth, it was clear that she worshipped Jobs and Apple. She liked to call Theranos’s blood-testing system “the iPod of health care” and predicted that, like Apple’s ubiquitous products, it would someday be in every household in the country.
In the summer of 2007, she took her admiration for Apple a step further by recruiting several of its employees to Theranos.

This blood-testing technique was known as a chemiluminescent immunoassay. (In laboratory speak, the word “assay” is synonymous with “blood test.”) The technique was not new: it had been pioneered in the early 1980s by a professor at Cardiff University. But Tony had automated it inside a machine that, though bigger than the toaster-size Theranos 1.0, was still small enough to make Elizabeth’s vision