M

| TWENTY-THREE |

Damage Control

eanwhile, behind the scenes, Holmes was trying another
avenue to quash the story.
In March, a month after I had started digging into the
company, Theranos had closed another round of funding.
Unbeknownst to me, the lead investor was Rupert Murdoch, the
Australian-born media mogul who controlled the Journal’s parent
company, News Corporation. Of the more than $430 million Theranos
had raised in this last round, $125 million had come from Murdoch.
That made him the company’s biggest investor.

Murdoch had first met Holmes in the fall of 2014 at one of Silicon
Valley’s big galas, the annual Breakthrough Prize dinner. Held in
Hangar 1 of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, the
award honors outstanding contributors to the fields of the life
sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. It was created by the
Russian technology investor Yuri Milner with Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and Chinese tech tycoon
Jack Ma. During the dinner, Holmes came over to Murdoch’s table,
introduced herself, and chatted him up. The strong first impression
she made on him was bolstered by Milner, who sang her praises when
Murdoch later asked him what he thought of the young woman.

They met again a few weeks later at the media mogul’s Northern
California ranch. Murdoch, who had only one bodyguard, was
surprised by the size of the security detail Holmes arrived with. When
he asked her why she needed it, she replied that her board insisted on