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| FIFTEEN |

Unicorn

he hated the artist’s illustration. He had made her head huge
and given her a vacuous, doe-eyed grin that screamed blond
bimbo. Other than that, there wasn’t much to dislike about the
article. It took up most of a page in the front section of the Wall Street
Journal and hit all the right notes. Drawing blood the traditional way
with a needle in the arm was likened to vampirism, or as the writer put
it more elegantly, “medicine by Bram Stoker.” Theranos’s processes,
by contrast, were described as requiring “only microscopic blood
volumes” and as “faster, cheaper and more accurate than the
conventional methods.” The brilliant young Stanford dropout behind
the breakthrough invention was anointed “the next Steve Jobs or Bill
Gates” by no less than former secretary of state George Shultz, the
man many credited with winning the Cold War, in a quote at the end
of the article.

Elizabeth had engineered the piece, which was published in the
Saturday, September 7, 2013, edition of the Journal, to coincide with
the commercial launch of Theranos’s blood-testing services. A press
release was due to go out first thing Monday morning announcing the
opening of the first Theranos wellness center in a Walgreens store in
Palo Alto and plans for a subsequent nationwide expansion of the
partnership. For a heretofore unknown startup, coverage this
flattering in one of the country’s most prominent and respected
publications was a major coup. What had made it possible was
Elizabeth’s close relationship with Shultz—a connection she’d made
two years earlier and carefully cultivated.