company’s second-highest-ranking executive, Sunny pocketed more
than $40 million. His timing was perfect. Five months later, the dot-
com bubble popped and the stock market came crashing down.
Commerce One eventually filed for bankruptcy.
Yet Sunny didn’t see himself as lucky. In his mind, he was a gifted
businessman and the Commerce One windfall was a validation of his
talent. When Elizabeth met him a few years later, she had no reason to
question that. She was an impressionable eighteen-year-old girl who
saw in Sunny what she wanted to become: a successful and wealthy
entrepreneur. He became her mentor, the person who would teach her
about business in Silicon Valley.
It isn’t clear exactly when Elizabeth and Sunny became romantically
involved, but it appears to have been not long after she dropped out of
Stanford. When they’d first met in China in the summer of 2002,
Sunny was married to a Japanese artist named Keiko Fujimoto and
living in San Francisco. By October 2004, he was listed as “a single
man” on the deed to a condominium he purchased on Channing
Avenue in Palo Alto. Other public records show Elizabeth moved into
that apartment in July 2005.
Sunny spent the decade after his brief and lucrative stint at
CommerceBid not doing much aside from enjoying his money and
giving Elizabeth advice behind the scenes. He had stayed on at
Commerce One as a vice president until January 2001 and then
enrolled in business school at Berkeley. He later took classes in
computer science at Stanford.
By the time he joined Theranos in September 2009, Sunny’s legal
record contained at least one red flag. To dodge taxes on his
CommerceBid earnings, he’d hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman,
which arranged for him to invest in a tax shelter. The maneuver
generated an artificial tax loss of $41 million that offset his
CommerceBid gains, all but eliminating his tax liability. When the
Internal Revenue Service cracked down on the practice in 2004,
Sunny was forced to pay the millions of dollars in back taxes he owed
in a settlement with the agency. He turned around and sued BDO,
claiming that he had been unsophisticated in tax matters and that the