firm had knowingly misled him. The suit was settled on undisclosed
terms in 2008.
Tax troubles aside, Sunny was proud of his wealth and liked to
broadcast it with his cars. He drove a black Lamborghini Gallardo and
a black Porsche 911. Both had vanity license plates. The one on the
Porsche read “DAZKPTL” in mock reference to Karl Marx’s treatise on
capitalism. The Lamborghini’s plate was “VDIVICI,” a play on the
phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), which Julius
Caesar used to describe his quick and decisive victory at the Battle of
Zela in a letter to the Roman Senate.
The way Sunny dressed was also meant to telegraph affluence,
though not necessarily taste. He wore white designer shirts with puffy
sleeves, acid-washed jeans, and blue Gucci loafers. His shirts’ top three
buttons were always undone, causing his chest hair to spill out and
revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. A pungent scent of
cologne emanated from him at all times. Combined with the flashy
cars, the overall impression was of someone heading out to a nightclub
rather than to the office.
Sunny’s expertise was software and that was where he was supposed
to add value at Theranos. In one of the first company meetings he
attended, he bragged that he’d written a million lines of code. Some
employees thought that was preposterous. Sunny had worked at
Microsoft, where teams of software engineers had written the
Windows operating system at the rate of one thousand lines of code
per year of development. Even if you assumed Sunny was twenty times
faster than the Windows developers, it would still have taken him fifty
years to do what he claimed.
Sunny was boastful and patronizing toward employees, but he was
also strangely elusive at times. When Don Lucas showed up at the
office once or twice a month to visit with Elizabeth, Sunny would
suddenly vanish. One employee found a note on an office printer that
Elizabeth had faxed to Lucas, in which she lauded Sunny’s skills and
résumé, so she hadn’t concealed his hiring. But people like Dave
Nelson, the engineer who had helped Tony Nugent build the first
Edison prototype and who now sat across from Chelsea’s cubicle,