shouldn’t have browsed porn on a work-issued laptop, but Matt didn’t
think it was a capital offense that merited blackmailing him. And
besides, it had been found after the fact. Saying it was the reason
Mosley was fired simply wasn’t true.
The way John Howard was treated also bothered him. When Matt
reviewed all the evidence assembled for the Michael O’Connell lawsuit,
he didn’t see anything proving that Howard had done anything wrong.
He’d had contact with O’Connell but he’d declined to join his
company. Yet Elizabeth insisted on connecting the dots a certain way
and suing him too, even though Howard had been one of the first
people to help her when she dropped out of Stanford, letting her use
the basement of his house in Saratoga for experiments in the
company’s early days. (Theranos later dropped the case against its
three ex-employees when O’Connell agreed to sign his patent over to
the company.)
Matt had long wanted to start his own IT consulting firm and he
decided this was the time to walk away and do it. When he informed
Elizabeth of his decision, she looked at him in utter disbelief. She
couldn’t comprehend how he could possibly trade in a job at a
company that was going to revolutionize health care and change the
world for that. She tried to entice him to stay with a raise and a
promotion, but he turned her down.
During his last couple of weeks at Theranos, what Matt had seen
happen to numerous other employees started happening to him.
Elizabeth wouldn’t speak to him anymore or even look at him. She
offered one of his IT colleagues, Ed Ruiz, his position if Ed agreed to
dig through Matt’s files and emails. But Ed was good friends with Matt
and refused. In any case, there was nothing to find. Matt was squeaky-
clean. Unlike Henry Mosley, he was able to keep his stock options and
to exercise them. He left Theranos in February 2008 and started his
own firm. Ed Ruiz joined him a few months later.
—
THERANOS’S NEW OFFICE in Palo Alto was nice, but it was actually too