Negative Glassdoor reviews about the company weren’t unusual.
Balwani made sure they were balanced out by a steady flow of fake
positive reviews he ordered members of the HR department to write.
But this particular one had sent him into a rage. After getting
Glassdoor to remove it, he’d launched a witch hunt in Newark,
conducting interrogations of employees he suspected of having written
it. He was so mean to one of them, a woman named Brooke Bivens,
that he made her cry. He never found the culprit.
More recently, Balwani had fired Lina Castro, a well-liked and
respected member of the microbiology team. Lina’s sin had been to
push the company to institute standard environmental health and
safety protections in the lab. The morning after he fired her, Balwani
had bragged to the remaining members of her team that he was worth
billions and that he came to work every day because he wanted to.
Everyone else should feel the same way, he said, implying that Castro
had been too negative and not committed enough to the Theranos
mission.
As had been the case in the old Facebook building in Palo Alto, the
lab’s operations in Newark were divided between Jurassic Park and
Normandy. The new Jurassic Park occupied a huge room with neon
lights and vinyl flooring. Lab associates’ desks were clustered in one
corner beneath a giant flat-screen monitor that displayed a constant
stream of inspirational quotes and complimentary customer reviews.
The commercial analyzers used to process regular venous samples
dotted the rest of the space. Normandy occupied another room
crammed with dozens of black-and-white Edisons and the Siemens
machines Daniel Young and Sam Gong had hacked.
Holmes and Balwani wanted to impress the vice president with a
vision of a cutting-edge, completely automated laboratory. So instead
of showing him the actual lab, they created a fake one. They made the
microbiology team vacate a third, smaller room, had it repainted, and
lined its walls with rows of miniLabs stacked up on metal shelves.
Since most of the miniLabs that had been built were in Palo Alto, they
had to be transported back across the bay for the stunt. The members
of the microbiology team weren’t sure why they were being moved at