time.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, Tyler arrived at his grandfather’s house early and
waited in the dining room. He wasn’t surprised when it was Brille who
showed up again. Holmes was playing his grandfather like a fiddle.
The lawyer had brought along a new set of documents. One of them
was an affidavit stating that Tyler had never spoken to any third
parties about Theranos and that he pledged to give the names of every
current and former employee who he knew had talked to the Journal.
Brille asked Tyler to sign the affidavit. Tyler refused.
“Tyler isn’t a snitch. Finding out who spoke to the Wall Street
Journal is Theranos’s problem, not his,” George said.
Brille ignored the former secretary of state and continued pressing
Tyler to sign the document and to name the newspaper’s sources. Look
at things from his perspective, he pleaded: in order to do his job, he
needed to get that information from him. But Tyler wouldn’t budge.
After the uncomfortable standoff had dragged on long enough,
George took Brille into a separate room and came back to talk to Tyler
alone. What would it take for him to sign that document? he asked his
grandson. Tyler replied that Theranos would have to add a clause
promising not to sue him.
George grabbed a pencil and scrawled a line on the affidavit to the
effect that Theranos pledged not to sue Tyler Shultz for two years.
Tyler wondered for a split second if his grandfather thought he was an
idiot.
“That doesn’t work for me,” he said. “It needs to say they won’t ever
sue me.”
“I’m just trying to come up with something Theranos will agree to,”
George protested.
But the old man seemed to realize the absurdity of what he’d just
proposed. He crossed out the words “two years” and replaced them
with “ever.” Then he stepped back out of the dining room to go talk to