five companies that would generate revenues of $120 million to $300 million over the next eighteen months. It listed another fifteen deals under negotiation. If those came to fruition, revenues could eventually reach $1.5 billion, according to the PowerPoint presentation.
The pharmaceutical companies were going to use Theranos’s blood-testing system to monitor patients’ response to new drugs. The cartridges and readers would be placed in patients’ homes during clinical trials. Patients would prick their fingers several times a day and the readers would beam their blood-test results to the trial’s sponsor. If the results indicated a bad reaction to the drug, the drug’s maker would be able to lower the dosage immediately rather than wait until the end of the trial. This would reduce pharmaceutical companies’ research costs by as much as 30 percent. Or so the slide deck said.
Mosley’s unease with all these claims had grown since that morning’s discovery. For one thing, in his eight months at Theranos, he’d never laid eyes on the pharmaceutical contracts. Every time he inquired about them, he was told they were “under legal review.” More important, he’d agreed to those ambitious revenue forecasts because he thought the Theranos system worked reliably.
If Elizabeth shared any of these misgivings, she showed no signs of it. She was the picture of a relaxed and happy leader. The new valuation, in particular, was a source of great pride. New directors might join the board to reflect the growing roster of investors, she told him.
Mosley saw an opening to broach the trip to Switzerland and the office rumors that something had gone wrong. When he did, Elizabeth admitted that there had been a problem, but she shrugged it off. It would easily be fixed, she said.
Mosley was dubious given what he now knew. He brought up what Shaunak had told him about the investor demos. They should stop doing them if they weren’t completely real, he said. “We’ve been fooling investors. We can’t keep doing that.”
Elizabeth’s expression suddenly changed. Her cheerful demeanor of just moments ago vanished and gave way to a mask of hostility. It was like a switch had been flipped. She leveled a cold stare at her chief financial officer.
“Henry, you’re not a team player,” she said in an icy tone. “I think you should leave right now.”
There was no mistaking what had just happened. Elizabeth wasn’t merely asking him to get out of her office. She was telling him to leave the company—immediately. Mosley had just been fired.
| ONE |
A Purposeful Life
Elizabeth Anne Holmes knew she wanted to be a successful entrepreneur from a young age.
When she was seven, she set out to design a time machine and filled up a notebook with detailed engineering drawings.
When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a family gathering the question every boy and girl is asked sooner or later: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, “I want to be a billionaire.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be president?” the relative asked.
“No, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion dollars.”
These weren’t the idle words of a child. Elizabeth uttered them with the utmost seriousness and determination, according to a family member who witnessed the scene.
Elizabeth’s ambition was nurtured by her parents. Christian and Noel Holmes had high expectations for their daughter rooted in a distinguished family history.
On her father’s side, she was descended from Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded a thriving business known as the Fleischmann Yeast Company. Its remarkable success turned the Fleischmanns into one of the wealthiest families in America at the turn of the twentieth century.
Bettie Fleischmann, Charles’s daughter, married her father’s Danish physician, Dr. Christian Holmes. He was Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather. Aided by the political and business connections of his wife’s wealthy family, Dr. Holmes established Cincinnati General Hospital and the University of Cincinnati’s medical school. So the case could be made—and it would in fact be made to the venture capitalists clustered on Sand Hill Road near the Stanford University campus—that Elizabeth didn’t just inherit entrepreneurial genes, but medical ones too.
Elizabeth’s mother, Noel, had her own proud family background. Her father was a West Point graduate who planned and carried out the shift from a draft-based military to an all-volunteer force as a high-ranking Pentagon official in the early 1970s. The Daousts traced their ancestry all the way back to the maréchal Davout, one of Napoleon’s top field generals.