cancer—the same story Tyler Shultz had found so inspiring when he’d
started working at Theranos.
It was true that Elizabeth’s uncle, Ron Dietz, had died eighteen
months earlier from skin cancer that had metastasized and spread to
his brain. But what she omitted to disclose was that she had never
been close to him. To family members who knew the reality of their
relationship, using his death to promote her company felt phony and
exploitative. Of course, no one in the audience at San Francisco’s
Palace of Fine Arts knew this. Most of the one thousand spectators in
attendance found her performance mesmerizing.
Clad all in black, she strode solemnly around the stage as she spoke,
like a preacher giving a sermon. In a stunt that made for brilliant
theater, she pulled a nanotainer out of her jacket pocket midway
through and held it up to illustrate how little blood Theranos’s tests
required. Calling the fear of needles “one of the basic human fears, up
there with the fear of spiders and the fear of heights,” she then told
other touching anecdotes. One was about a little girl who got stuck
repeatedly with a syringe by a hospital nurse who couldn’t find her
vein. Another was about cancer patients whose spirits were broken by
all the blood they had to give as part of their treatments.
One of the people watching from a seat halfway up the auditorium
was Patrick O’Neill, whom Elizabeth had hired away from
TBWA\Chiat\Day and appointed Theranos’s chief creative officer.
Patrick had become instrumental in honing Elizabeth’s image and
raising her profile. He had helped her prepare for the conference and
before that had worked with Fortune’s photographer on the
magazine’s cover shoot. To Patrick, making Elizabeth the face of
Theranos made perfect sense. She was the company’s most powerful
marketing tool. Her story was intoxicating. Everyone wanted to believe
in it, including the numerous young girls who were sending her letters
and emails. It wasn’t a cynical calculus on his part: Patrick was one of
her biggest believers. He had no knowledge of the shenanigans in the
lab and didn’t pretend to understand the science of blood testing. As
far as he was concerned, the fairy tale was real.
Before he became a full-time employee, Elizabeth had hung