wasn’t entirely her doing. Her emergence tapped into the public’s
hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology
world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in
Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from
scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire
tech founder.
Still, there was something unusual in the way Elizabeth embraced
the limelight. She behaved more like a movie star than an
entrepreneur, basking in the public adulation she was receiving. Each
week brought a new media interview or conference appearance. Other
well-known startup founders gave interviews and made public
appearances too but with nowhere near the same frequency. The
image of the reclusive, ascetic young woman Parloff had been sold on
had overnight given way to that of the ubiquitous celebrity.
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. Elizabeth also had a personal
chef who prepared her salads and green vegetable juices made of
cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, lettuce, and celery. And when she
had to fly somewhere, it was in a private Gulfstream jet.
—
PART OF WHAT made Elizabeth’s persona so compelling was her
heartwarming message about using Theranos’s convenient blood tests
to catch diseases early so that, as she put it in interview after
interview, no one would have to say goodbye to loved ones too soon. In
September 2014, three months after the Fortune cover story, she made
that message more poignant during a speech at the TEDMED
conference in San Francisco by adding a personal dimension to it: for
the first time, she told the story in public of her uncle who had died of