running in the parking lot overnight.
After several crazed hours, Matt was finally able to talk some sense
into her by pointing out that even if they somehow cleared the building
by 11:59 p.m. that night, they would still have to conduct walkthroughs
with state officials to demonstrate that they had properly disposed of
any hazardous materials. Theranos was a biotech company, after all.
Those walkthroughs would take weeks to schedule and no new tenant
would be able to move in until they had occurred.
In the end, the move took place the next day as originally planned,
but the episode was the final straw for Matt. Part of him admired
Elizabeth. She was one of the smartest people he’d ever met and she
could be a really inspiring and energizing leader. He often joked that
she could sell ice cream to Eskimos. But another part of him was tiring
of her unpredictability and the constant chaos at the company.
One aspect of Matt’s job had become increasingly distasteful to him.
Elizabeth demanded absolute loyalty from her employees and if she
sensed that she no longer had it from someone, she could turn on
them in a flash. In Matt’s two and a half years at Theranos, he had
seen her fire some thirty people, not counting the twenty or so
employees who lost their jobs at the same time as Ed Ku when the
microfluidic platform was abandoned.
Every time Elizabeth fired someone, Matt had to assist with
terminating the employee. Sometimes, that meant more than just
revoking the departing employee’s access to the corporate network and
escorting him or her out of the building. In some instances, she asked
him to build a dossier on the person that she could use for leverage.
There was one case in particular that Matt regretted helping her
with: that of Henry Mosley, the former chief financial officer. After
Elizabeth fired Mosley, Matt had stumbled across inappropriate sexual
material on his work laptop as he was transferring its files to a central
server for safekeeping. When Elizabeth found out about it, she used it
to claim it was the cause of Mosley’s termination and to deny him
stock options.
Matt had reported to Mosley until he left and thought he’d done an
excellent job of helping Elizabeth raise money for Theranos. He clearly