As obstinate as Elizabeth was, Ed knew there was one person who
had her ear: a mysterious man named Sunny. Elizabeth had dropped
his name enough times that Ed had gleaned some basic facts about
him: he was Indian, he was older than Elizabeth, and they were a
couple. The story was that Sunny had made a fortune from the sale of
an internet company he’d cofounded in the late 1990s.
Sunny wasn’t a visible presence at Theranos but he seemed to loom
large in Elizabeth’s life. At the company Christmas party in a Palo Alto
restaurant in late 2006, Elizabeth got too tipsy to go home on her own,
so she called Sunny and asked him to come pick her up. That’s when
Ed learned that they were living together in a condo a few blocks away.
Sunny wasn’t the only older man giving Elizabeth advice. She had
brunch with Don Lucas every Sunday at his home in Atherton, the
ultrawealthy enclave north of Palo Alto. Larry Ellison, whom she’d met
through Lucas, was also an influence. Lucas and Ellison had both
invested in Theranos’s second funding round, which in Silicon Valley
parlance was known as a “Series B” round. Ellison sometimes dropped
by in his red Porsche to check on his investment. It wasn’t uncommon
to hear Elizabeth start a sentence with “Larry says.”
Ellison might be one of the richest people in the world, with a net
worth of some $25 billion, but he wasn’t necessarily the ideal role
model. In Oracle’s early years, he had famously exaggerated his
database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling
with bugs. That’s not something you could do with a medical device.
It was hard to know how much Elizabeth’s approach to running
Theranos was her own and how much she was channeling Ellison,
Lucas, or Sunny, but one thing was clear: she wasn’t happy when Ed
refused to make his engineering group run 24/7. From that moment
on, their relationship cooled.
Before long, Ed noticed that Elizabeth was making new engineering
hires, but she wasn’t having them report to him. They formed a
separate group. A rival group. It dawned on him that she was pitting
his engineering team and the new team against each other in some
corporate version of survival of the fittest.
Ed didn’t have time to dwell on it too much because there was