neighborhood.
One day, Noel came over to the Fuisz home for lunch. Richard
joined them out on the house’s big stone patio and the conversation
drifted to Elizabeth. She had just been profiled in Inc. magazine
alongside several other young entrepreneurs, including Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg. The press her daughter was beginning to garner was
a source of great pride to Noel.
As they nibbled on a meal Lorraine had picked up from a McLean
gourmet shop, Fuisz suggested to Noel in a syrupy singsong voice he
employed when he turned on the charm that he could be of assistance
to Elizabeth. It was easy for a small company like Theranos to be taken
advantage of by bigger ones, he noted. He didn’t reveal his patent
filing, but the comments may have been enough to put the Holmeses
on alert. From that point on, interactions between the two couples
became fraught.
The Fuiszes and Holmeses met twice for dinner in the waning
months of 2006. One dinner was at Sushiko, a Japanese restaurant
down the road from Chris and Noel’s new apartment. Chris didn’t eat
much that evening. While visiting Elizabeth in Palo Alto,
complications from a recent surgery had forced him to make a detour
to Stanford Hospital. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, Sunny, had
arranged for him to stay in the hospital’s VIP suite and covered the
bill, he told the Fuiszes.
The conversation turned to Theranos, which had completed its
second round of funding earlier in the year. Chris mentioned that the
fund-raising had attracted some of the biggest investors in Silicon
Valley, which was a good thing, he added, because he and Noel had put
the $30,000 they’d saved for Elizabeth’s Stanford tuition into the
company.
The dinner then apparently grew testy for reasons that aren’t
entirely clear. Richard and Chris had never gotten along and Richard
may have said something that got under the other man’s skin.
Whatever the case, according to Lorraine, Chris Holmes criticized the
Chanel necklace she was wearing and later, after they’d settled the bill
and wandered out onto Wisconsin Avenue, made what seemed like a