than two weeks away.
Baker told Boies that we weren’t going to wait weeks but that he was
willing to push back publication by a few more days to give Holmes
one last opportunity to talk to me. He gave her until early the following
week to pick up the phone and call me. She never did.
—
THE STORY WAS PUBLISHED on the Journal’s front page on Thursday,
October 15, 2015. The headline, “A Prized Startup’s Struggles,” was
understated but the article itself was devastating. In addition to
revealing that Theranos ran all but a small fraction of its tests on
conventional machines and laying bare its proficiency-testing
shenanigans and its dilution of finger-stick samples, it raised serious
questions about the accuracy of its own devices. It ended with a quote
from Maureen Glunz saying that “trial and error on people” was “not
OK,” bringing home what I felt was the most important point: the
medical danger to which the company had exposed patients.
The story sparked a firestorm. NPR interviewed me on its
Marketplace program first thing in the morning. The editor of
Fortune, the publication that had done more than any other to elevate
Holmes to stardom, made the story the focus of his daily email to
readers. “A high-flying unicorn has been brought closer to earth this
morning by a deeply reported story on the front page of the Wall
Street Journal,” he wrote. Forbes and The New Yorker, two other
magazines that had played roles in Holmes’s rise to fame, also picked
up the story, as did many other news outlets.
In Silicon Valley, it became the talk of the town. Some venture
capitalists reflexively jumped to Holmes’s defense. One of them was
former Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, whose wife had just
profiled Holmes in a cover story for the New York Times’s style
magazine headlined “Five Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs Who Are
Changing the World.” But others were less charitable, having long
harbored doubts of their own. Why had Holmes always been so
secretive about her technology? Why had she never recruited a board