Bad Blood

Justin tried to remind himself that Elizabeth was very young and still had a lot to learn about running a company. In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self-help books to her, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t and Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work, and included their links on Amazon.com.
He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part:
good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you…Lying is a disgusting habit, and it flows through the conversations here like it’s our own currency. The cultural disease here is what we should be curing before we try to tackle obesity…I mean no ill will towards you, since you believe in what I was doing and hoped I would succeed at Theranos. I feel like I owe you this bad attempt at an exit interview since we have no HR to officially record it.

Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery

Rather than take the fall herself, she sacrificed her boyfriend. She broke up with him and fired him

Rochelle spoke on the record even though she had inherited from her husband Theranos stock options that were potentially worth millions of dollars. She didn’t care about the money, she said, and in any case, she didn’t believe the shares were really worth anything.

She was the company’s most powerful marketing tool.

As much as she courted the attention, Elizabeth’s sudden fame wasn’t entirely her doing. Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men.

George, on the other hand, was unmoved. Tyler had noticed how much he doted on Elizabeth. His relationship with her seemed closer than their own.

utmost seriousness and determination

according to a family member

Both had envisioned some sort of sophisticated microfluidic system. But this seemed like something a middle-schooler could build in his garage.