[0:03]Theranos began as a startup of almost mythical proportions and goals in 2003. It's just an incredible morality tale. A woman once hailed as a Silicon Valley visionary is facing federal fraud charges tonight. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has now officially been indicted on federal wire fraud charges, the US attorney's office accusing her of engaging in. Imagine building a company that everyone thought would change the world, but ended up being one of the biggest frauds in history. Theranos, the company started in 2003 by Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes, was just that. They fooled everyone receiving over $600 million of funding in the process. What Theranos promised was a revolutionary blood analyzer that could run hundreds of tests just from a finger prick in the comfort of your own home. However, this story isn't one of great success or inspiration. This story is about deceit, fraud, manipulation, and a CEO who would stop at nothing to get her goal. This is the story of Theranos, a company once worth $9 billion, and the story of how it all came crashing down in one of the worst disasters in Silicon Valley history. What exactly was Theranos, and how did it go so horribly wrong?
[1:23]Elizabeth Holmes was born to a well-connected family with a rich history. From a young age, Elizabeth knew what she wanted in life: to be a billionaire. At age 18, she went on a Stanford-run tour of China, where she met a man 20 years her senior called Sunny. Sunny immigrated from Pakistan and had some success in the dot-com boom of 1999, pocketing $40 million in the process. He had what she wanted: money and the status of a successful entrepreneur. Sunny would later play a big role in Elizabeth's company. During another trip to Asia, Elizabeth witnessed the SARS outbreak. From that point, she came home determined to change the world. Upon returning home, she didn't leave her room for five days and slept two hours a night while working on a patent idea. The idea was to create a wearable patch which could continually test the blood of the wearer and admit the right dose of medicine in real time. Filled with determination, she dropped out of Stanford at age 19 and started her own company. The early days were not glamorous. The office of the new company was in a part of town known for shootings. One day, while in her car, Elizabeth was shot at with the bullet just narrowly missing her. Despite this, she received a $1 million seed investment from her old neighbor, who had made some money investing in Hotmail. Early on, Elizabeth wrote on the reputation of her investors. However, when it came to investors that specialized in medicine, she struggled to convince them as her lack of knowledge started showing. It wasn't a surprise, because she had only spent a few semesters at university. So, for most tech entrepreneurs, this kind of thing isn't a big issue. For example, Mark Zuckerberg only needed to master coding as a child, and he could have struck it big with little university knowledge. On the other hand, medicine and chemistry are fields that require decades of knowledge and research to find a breakthrough. Regardless, by the end of the year, Elizabeth had nearly $6 million in funding and her idea had changed. Now, the blood testing would be done by a cartridge and reader system. Here's how it was supposed to work. Patients would prick their fingers, storing blood in a small cartridge. Pushing this cartridge into a machine would run the tests. The Theranos machines envisioned would perform tests on the spot and beam information via the internet to a lab where personnel would interpret the results and send a report back. Traditionally, the current industry procedure was to draw a syringe full of blood from a vein and physically send the sample to a lab. The old way used large machines the size of several business photocopiers and the results would take a few days to get back from a doctor. Theranos would try to scale down the components of these massive machines to fit into a box the size of a personal computer. Theranos was going to make this process faster, more comfortable and completely bypass the need for a doctor. In this particular medical field, there are many components that are used to test blood, each of which performs a different type of test. For example, one test shoots a beam of light into the sample blood and measures the light reflected, while other tests require chemical reactions. Now, this is the big lie and the problem with Theranos. There were several issues that made the Theranos machines nearly impossible. Firstly, the components would interfere with each other when placed in close proximity due to a magnitude of problems including heat, light and electrical activity. Next, to have sufficient volume of test samples from only a pinprick on a finger, the drops of blood had to be diluted. Overdiluted samples gave inaccurate results and was outside the detection capability of the hardware. So, in short, for the technology to be possible, Theranos had to make major breakthroughs on all fronts of blood analysis. They had to do all of this while only reporting to Elizabeth, who didn't really have the knowledge. Skipping forward to 2006, Theranos had some momentum and a prototype called the Theranos 1.0. Elizabeth enlisted engineers to design a new version called the Edison. However, no Theranos machine would ever be accurate or capable of performing the full range of tests that Elizabeth claimed. Elizabeth started to push the engineering team manager to make the Edison development run 24/7. When the manager refused, stating that the engineers were overworked as it is, Elizabeth hired a parallel engineering team and pitted the two teams against each other in a survival of the fittest race. This kind of thing was actually a tactic that Steve Jobs also used with the original Mac and the iPhone. But in Theranos's case, the losing team would be fired. Elizabeth also started doing some ethically questionable things, such as running a pilot test on cancer patients with the company Pfizer. She knew the product didn't work yet, but insisted on running real tests on people that had serious illnesses. To highlight how serious this was, blood tests are usually used to increase or decrease a patient's dosage of medication or diagnose conditions which may require immediate action. Doctors use lab results to base 70% of their decisions on, if the results are false, it could be fatal. Of course, the only reason the cancer trials went ahead is that Elizabeth had been outright lying to investors and clients about how well the product actually worked. The same year, the company's CFO discovered that Elizabeth had been lying. He told her to stop. Instead of agreeing, she fired him on the spot. After this, Elizabeth never hired another chief financial officer again, leaving the position vacant for a decade.
[6:44]In 2007, there was no bigger Silicon Valley star than Steve Jobs. Elizabeth had started developing an obsession for Jobs. An employee even found a newspaper cut out on her desk where someone called her The Next Steve Jobs. The obsession bordered on insanity. For example, after she found out that Steve scheduled marketing meetings on Wednesdays, she would do the same with the same marketing firm that Steve used. She would even recruit a few Apple employees. One of this included one of Steve Jobs's oldest friends and the former senior Vice President of Software at Apple, Avie Tevanian. He even went out of retirement to join the Theranos board. The board of Theranos was made up of a star-studded panel. Don Lucas, who mentored the founder of Oracle, was the chairman. One day, Elizabeth wanted to restructure the company's shares, which would give her majority voting rights. Ex-Apple employee Avie, who was on the board, didn't think that this was a good idea, and paired with the information that he'd received from employees about the problems during testing, he felt like he had to do something. He spoke with Don Lucas, the chairman, but this resulted in Avie resigning after he felt that his advice fell on deaf ears. Elizabeth had the board wrapped around her finger. She was a master manipulator. She spoke in a low baritone voice in order to be taken more seriously. The question was as an 18 year old how do you go about the process of convincing people that you know what you're doing, it's about finding people who believe in you because the worst possible thing in the world is to have someone who doesn't believe in you backing you because that's not going to result in a good situation. On occasion, she forgot to put on the voice and was caught using her natural voice before realizing and dropping several tones. No, it hasn't. Well, if I use traditional words to describe what we're doing, it's hard because people then associate it with conventional processes for analyzing drugs and development. Shortly after the company moved to a prime location in Silicon Valley, a new member of the sales team soon found out that the financial projections were based off pilot tests that weren't honest. The issue was brought to the board, who ran an emergency meeting and decided to fire Elizabeth. Two hours after they brought her in to tell her the decision, she had convinced them to reverse it. This incredible power of persuasion is another reason why Theranos went so far with no real working technology. Shortly after the meeting, Elizabeth fired those who raised the alarm. By this stage, employees leaving or being fired was common. In fact, all employees who came from Apple would leave in just a couple of years. Around this time, an old family friend, Richard Fuisz, created a patent for a method of transmitting information from blood testing machines to doctors. He did this out of revengeful spite for not being asked advice when Elizabeth started the company in his field of expertise. He was a doctor who sold his medical demonstration video company for $50 million. In a few years time, Richard would go to court with Theranos over the patent he made, which in private, he called The Theranos Killer. Richard's patents wouldn't go on to kill Theranos, but his actions would. By 2009, Sunny, the millionaire Pakistani immigrant, was now Elizabeth's boyfriend and had joined the company as second in charge. Sunny came from a software background and had little knowledge of the inner workings of a medical company. He claimed to have written 10 million lines of code while at Microsoft, but the average developer at Microsoft only writes a thousand lines a year. He also boasted of having extreme wealth and only coming to work because he wanted to. He also had a habit of latching onto buzzwords and using them despite little knowledge of the topic. Engineers would use terms out of context to see if he would continue to use them. He did, but Sunny knew how to control people. He was feared within the company. He constantly fired people and let his tempers flare. 2010 saw a whole lot of money pouring into Silicon Valley. Facebook, Twitter, and Uber were all taking off. Meanwhile, Walgreens and Safeway had both entered talks with Theranos to partner and create wellness centers. These were sections in their stores where patients could get blood tests. Theranos presented Walgreens with 192 different tests that could be performed by their Edison machine. However, only about half of them were even theoretically possible. The only proof that the technology worked was a review from John Hopkins Medical School. The document was only two pages long and summarized the meeting where Theranos showed the university representatives some data results. No actual testing was done on the machines themselves. But Theranos was hot stuff, and Walgreens had the fear of missing out and letting their competitors land a partnership. Elizabeth also made such an impression on the Walgreens and Safeway executives that they trusted every word she said. Combined, Safeway and Walgreens gave Theranos $105 million in investment and loans. Around this time, Elizabeth realized that the Edison wasn't good enough, so she commissioned the MiniLab, the third iteration of the blood testing product. Meanwhile, Sunny intimidated employees and watched CCTV footage of them to see exactly how long people were working. One time, he told an employee that he would quote, fix him, after finding that he'd only worked eight hours per day. Elizabeth backed up the decision, stating to employees that quote, if anyone here believes you are not working on the best thing humans have ever built or if you're cynical, then you should leave. End quote. Basically, anyone who agreed with Elizabeth got promoted, and those who doubted got fired.
[12:09]By 2012, Safeway wasn't doing well. They had poured $350 million into renovations of store space across their store locations, in anticipation for the Theranos machines. They were only met with constant launch delays and excuses. When Theranos did start accepting Safeway employee samples, they were tested on existing commercial third-party machines in a lab. But Safeway was lied to and gave them the impression that all of these tests were being performed on Theranos Edison machines.
[12:37]They weren't even running most of the tests on the Theranos devices. And most of the tests were being run on third-party machines. Did Miss Holmes know at the time that Theranos could not do all those tests? She, yeah, she knew.
[12:54]Meanwhile, Theranos's lawsuit from Richard, the jealous family friend and medical doctor, was in full swing. He was serious about taking Theranos down. He hired the same lawyer that worked on the deposition case of Bill Gates. And the cost, $1,000 an hour. A pivotal point for Theranos's downfall came with the subpoena of Ian Gibbons, who had led the chemistry team since 2005. In May of 2013, Ian was notified by Theranos that in just two days time, he would be involved in Richard's trial. He feared that anything that he might say may put the company in jeopardy and expose the lies. Ian was miserable at Theranos, and had just been demoted, but feared that leaving as a 67-year-old would make it impossible for him to get another job. The next morning, Ian's wife Rochelle found him in the bathroom having overdosed on medication. He died a week later in hospital. Back at Theranos, in a display of the coldest heart, Elizabeth didn't return Rochelle's call about the death of her husband. Elizabeth informed only a small number of employees about Ian's passing and loosely mentioned hosting a service. This was never carried out. She seemed to have just brushed off Ian's death pretty casually. After spending $2 million on the case, Richard settled in a massive blow to his pride. This would fuel the fire in Richard that would eventually bring down Theranos. During this period, Theranos was still carrying out tests on third-party machines and desperately trying to get results. This included stacking six mini labs on top of each other to get a higher throughput of tests. The additional heat generated actually hindered the accuracy of tests further. But Theranos didn't have time to work on their technology. They had already promised their machines to the world and they had a $140 million contract with Walgreens which required them to launch by February 2013, and they were four months overdue. The lies continued. The financial forecast that Sunny gave to investors were 10 times higher than the internal forecasts of the company. These numbers were completely fabricated as Theranos was operating without a CFO for the last seven years, ever since he was fired.
[14:57]Theranos's board, as always, was still stacked with high-profile reputable names, so no one doubted the company. This included former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, former director of US Office of Management and Budget, George Shultz, and future Secretary of Defense, Jim "Maddog" Mattis, had all joined the board. The company was very politically connected by this stage. Elizabeth even threw Hillary Clinton a fundraiser for her 2016 campaign. Money just kept pouring in. Partner Fund put $94 million in shares, Rupert Murdoch chipped in $125 million, the Walmart brothers put in $150 million, the DeVos family put in another $100 million. This gave Theranos a $9 billion valuation, and Elizabeth was worth $5 billion alone. The shortcomings of the technology were well known within the company, but employees were usually too scared to do anything, fearing retaliation from Sunny, Elizabeth, or the company's lawyers. Employees were forced to sign confidentiality agreements when they started and again when they left. This stopped a lot of people from taking action. Tyler Shultz, grandson of the board member, George Shultz, was in a more privileged position. He noticed the issues at Theranos, and after falling on Sunny and Elizabeth's deaf ears, he quit. He tried to talk to his grandfather. He told George about the Edison's inaccuracy and the constant failing of quality control tests. He told him about how Theranos had duped everyone by testing samples on existing third-party commercial machines, and not Theranos's own Edison machine. Incredibly, Elizabeth had put such a spell on George Shultz, that he would disregard everything his grandson Tyler told him. In mid-2014, Fortune magazine released a front-page story titled, "This CEO is out for blood." This rocketed Elizabeth to celebrity status, and from this point, she is constantly making media appearances. Forbes, USA Today, NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News all took their turn to cover the success story of the youngest ever self-made female billionaire. Barack Obama made Elizabeth the US Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, and she was added to the Board of Fellows at Harvard Medical School. Elizabeth enjoyed the fame. She grew her security team to 20. Her office was redesigned to look like the President's Oval Office, complete with bulletproof glass. Elizabeth spoke on a TED Talk about her idea to change the world. She said, "Soon no one would have to say goodbye too soon," and went on to tell the audience of a heartfelt story about how her uncle had passed away from cancer. But of course, the TED Talk was merely an act. In reality, she wasn't even close to her uncle, and had just exploited his death for her narrative. Meanwhile, cracks were beginning to crumble the empire. Richard, by this stage, had created a gang of Theranos skeptics including Ian's widow, Rochelle. They collected information, and then took it to John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal. As John began investigating, countless sources and former employees came out of the woodwork. They anonymously provided information about the story. Theranos attacked everyone who was talking. They used their pile of money and they threatened to sue everyone else who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. They even hired private investigators to stalk anyone they suspected. Several letters were sent to the Wall Street Journal to try and kill the story, threatening defamation lawsuits. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, and investor in Theranos, was asked by Elizabeth to personally kill the story. He refused, stating that he had confidence in the editors to handle the truth, whatever it may be. The reaction from Theranos was intense, and the story wasn't even out yet. Business as usual continued at Theranos. Elizabeth was making White House appearances often then. But under the veneer, the machines could still only do a small number of tests, and were inaccurate with even just those. Theranos continued to demonstrate the MiniLab for VIP guests. They pricked their finger, then waited until they left, and then went on to use existing commercial third-party lab machines to return the results. Vice President Joe Biden even paid Theranos a visit. He was shown a fake lab that was set up just for the visit. He was impressed, saying that it was the lab of the future and praised Theranos. The dark truth about Theranos was finally unveiled in the Wall Street Journal article of October 15, 2015. It was a bombshell. All the major news articles picked it up. People began questioning Theranos and its secrecy. Elizabeth took it all in her stride, not shying away from the questions, but instead, outright lying to the public. It appeared that she thought everyone would just believe her again, but this time, it was different. Now people were asking serious questions.
[19:42]And just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a pretty scathing article about the company, alleging that the company's proprietary testing devices may be inaccurate. And basically accusing Theranos of deceptive practices to Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of Theranos, to give her a chance to answer the charges raised in the article. Miss Holmes, welcome back to Mad Money. It's great to be here. Thank you. What do you think is going on here? This is what happens when you work to change things and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden you change the world and um I I have to say I I personally was shocked to see that the journal would publish something like this. Just as the story had been published, the FDA made a surprise inspection at Theranos. In further investigations, it was found that the Theranos Edison blood testing machine only performed 12 out of 250 tests. And even those produced widely erratic results. Now, Theranos was in full damage control. Elizabeth broke up with Sunny and fired him. A criminal investigation was underway, and a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission was also proceeding. The investors began suing Theranos one by one. Partner Fund sued for $100 million. Walgreens for $140 million. Elizabeth had to close the trial lab and had to pay $4.5 million to Arizona's state, where most patients had received testing. Theranos had voided nearly a million lab results. Ten patients would sue Theranos for medical battery. But shockingly, amongst all of this, Elizabeth never apologized. It seemed to her merely a mistake along the way which could be fixed.
[21:20]So, Elizabeth and Sunny both knew what they were doing, lying to investors, their clients, the regulators, patients, and even their own board. No one outside can be blamed for not realizing the fraud ahead of time. Even the board, made up of seasoned professionals, was masterfully manipulated into giving Elizabeth 99.7% of the voting rights. She seemed by all accounts a sociopath, willing to stop at nothing to make her company a success, not caring who or what got in her way. And who knows how far the lie could have gone. She continued with all smiles and lies even after the truth came out. Elizabeth's actions could be a microcosm, a case for a modern problem in society, where the need to be successful, or at least appear successful, outweighs everything else. There's possibly another fault at play here, a fault in the human condition. It's the illusionary effect where if you repeat a lie enough times, people start to believe it. Especially if you have credible names surrounding the product. The SEC settled with Elizabeth Holmes in March of 2018. She lost voting control, had to give away her portion of the stock, and was banned from being an officer or director of any public company for 10 years. Sunny still hasn't reached a settlement with the SEC. But Sunny and Elizabeth had been indicted on criminal charges in an ongoing lawsuit at the time of this video. They are both pleaded not guilty and each face 20 years in prison. Theranos was dissolved in September 2018.
[22:49]So, one question remains. If Theranos was to keep going, would they have made it? Would their blood testing machinery ever have worked? Well, actually, it's a harder question to answer than one might think. When they were running out of money, they tested on real patients as a proof of concept to gain more funding, which is of course what brought them down in the first place. But say they did get funding without testing on patients. The unveiled MiniLab was only incrementally better than the Edison machine, even though Theranos had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. So with that being said, it's pretty unlikely that any company would have succeeded at this. So that wraps up our look at Theranos. So I know that would have lost some of the faith in humanity that you had. But if you want to see some real actual breakthroughs in research in the medical field, things such as real life nanobots being used in cancer with success in mice trials, or stem cells being injected directly into the brains of stroke victims, allowing for recoveries never seen before and even enabling a wheelchair-bound man to walk again. This is the kind of cool stuff that gets lost in the sea of media day-to-day, but you can find those videos right here on Cold Fusion. I'll leave a link in the description below. Anyway, thanks for watching. This has been Dagogo. You've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll see you again soon for the next video. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.
