Sunny’s connections there were shady and that he was paying bribes to
obtain blood samples from infected patients. When a colleague of
Chelsea’s in the client solutions group named Stefan Hristu quit
immediately upon returning from a trip to Thailand with Sunny in
January 2010, many took it to mean the rumors were true.
Chelsea was back from Mexico by then and the Thailand gossip
spooked her. She knew there was an anti-bribery law called the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Violating it was a felony that could
result in prison time.
—
WHEN SHE STOPPED to think about it, there were a lot of things that
made Chelsea uncomfortable about Theranos. And none more so than
Sunny. He spawned a culture of fear with his intimidating behavior.
Firings had always been a common occurrence at the company, but in
late 2009 and early 2010 it was Sunny who took on the role of hatchet
man. Chelsea even learned a new expression: to disappear someone.
That’s how employees used the normally intransitive verb when
someone was dismissed. “Sunny disappeared him,” they would say,
conjuring up the image of a Mafia hit in 1970s Brooklyn.
The scientists, especially, were afraid of Sunny. One of the only ones
who stood up to him was Seth Michelson. A few days before
Christmas, Seth had gone out and purchased polo shirts for his group.
Their color matched the green of the company logo and they had the
words “Theranos Biomath” emblazoned on them. Seth thought it was a
nice team-building gesture and paid for it out of his own pocket.
When Sunny saw the polos, he got angry. He didn’t like that he
hadn’t been consulted and he argued that Seth’s gift to his team made
the other managers look bad. Earlier in his career, Seth had worked at
Roche, the big Swiss drugmaker, where he’d been in charge of seventy
people and an annual budget of $25 million. He decided he wasn’t
going to let Sunny lecture him about management. He pushed back
and they got into a yelling match.
After that, Sunny seemed to have it in for Seth and frequently