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Researched by: Sara Varghese & Prafula Grace Busi

A quick refresher on Theranos

Here’s a very brief background. If you want to understand exactly what happened, we strongly recommend watching ‘The Inventor’ on Disney+Hotstar. 

The company: was founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003—at the tender age of 19 when she dropped out of Stanford. 

The product: The company claimed it had developed revolutionary blood-testing technology. Instead of vials of blood, Theranos’ blood tests would only require a finger prick—and that single sample could deliver results of up to 30 different tests within hours. The company offered more than 240 tests, ranging from cholesterol to cancer. All this thanks to its patented ‘Edison’ machines. And it would cost half as much as current tests. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it was.

At its peak: Theranos was valued at $9 billion and Elizabeth Holmes had a net worth of almost $5 billion—and was on the cover of every glossy as the youngest self-made billionaire. The company was backed by former US Secretary of State George Schultz, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and America’s richest family, the Waltons. Each invested $100 million or more in Theranos—which are now worthless. You can see her below sharing the stage with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Bill Clinton.

The reality: In 2015, a whistleblower blew the lid on scam. And the Wall Street Journal did a series of exposés—which revealed that the so-called Edison machine was mostly a fiction. It was unreliable and threw up inaccurate results. More damningly, the company was secretly conducting the tests on machines bought from other companies.

The fall: Lawsuits followed, investors cut ties—and in 2016, US regulators banned Holmes from operating a blood-testing service for two years. By 2018, the company had dissolved—having become a symbol of Silicon Valley excess. Holmes was arrested three months later along with her former partner Sunny Balwani. In 2022, she was found guilty of four counts of wire fraud for lying to investors—but never convicted of duping patients.

Meet the lovers: Lizzie aur Sunny ki jodi

Elizabeth Holmes: was raised in a “comfortably well-off family” in Washington DC—to bureaucrats who “were very interested in status” and “lived for connections.” Her great great grandfather founded Fleischmann’s Yeast—which became famous for revolutionising America’s bread industry—and “the family was very conscious about its lineage.” So was Holmes. At the age of nine, she told her father what she “really want[ed] out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do.” Others confirm that her parents were continually pushing her to be exceptional. Holmes once tweeted this childhood photo with the message: “There is no dream you can’t achieve. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Anecdote to note: She started her first company as a second-year student at Stanford called Real-Time Cures. Thanks to a typo, early employees’ paychecks actually said “Real-Time Curses.” The name was later changed to Theranos—perhaps to avoid such Freudian slips.

Obsession with greatness: Holmes never stopped being preoccupied with personal grandeur—and tried to remake herself into a female Steve Jobs, black turtlenecks included. She referred to the Theranos blood-testing system as “the iPod of healthcare,” and even nicknamed it “the 4s.” Holmes even changed her voice—making it deeper and more authoritative—but often “fell out of character,” particularly after drinking, and would speak in a higher voice. 

More bizarrely, her version of Jobs was based on a Walter Isaacson biography—“borrowing behaviours and management techniques.” Apparently, Theranos employees “were all reading the book too and could pinpoint which chapter she was on based on which period of Jobs’s career she was impersonating.”

All of which: made her a terrible employer—demanding, paranoid with a tendency to spy on her staff—and a disastrous founder. In his biography, John Carreyrou wrote this of “her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs”:

“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew.”

Sunny Balwani: has a more straightforward biography. The 56-year-old was born in Pakistan but grew up in India. He went to the US for an undergraduate degree in information systems at the University of Texas. Balwani worked at Microsoft and Lotus Software before starting his own company CommerceBid in 1999—during the first dot com boom. He cashed his shares out for more than $40 million. Balwani went on to get an MBA from UC Berkeley as well as a degree in computer science from Stanford before joining Theranos as president in 2009.

Point to note: He was married to Japanese artist Keiko Fujimoto before they divorced in 2002—soon after he met Holmes.

The Balwani mystery: No one has bothered to psychoanalyse Balwani or his background. But Holmes’ friends never understood why she chose him: 

“[She] didn’t understand what her friend saw in this man, who was nearly two decades older than she and was lacking in the most basic grace and manners. All her instincts told her Sunny was bad news, but Elizabeth seemed to have the utmost confidence in him.”

You can see a rare photo of them together below:

Jab they met: The two reportedly first met in 2002 in Beijing during a course in Mandarin—when she was 18 and he was 37—the only older adult in the program. They kept in touch via email. Holmes claims she saw him as an older, wiser mentor. It's not clear when this admiration turned to romance—but it likely happened when Holmes dropped out of Stanford in 2004, and moved in with Balwani a year later. So, yeah, she was still very young. 

An eerie detail: On the stand, Holmes said she dropped out of Stanford because she was raped:

“I was questioning what, how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I was going to do with my life. And I decided I was going to build a life by building this company… He [Balwani] said that I was safe now that I had met him.”

A very toxic romance

A “secret” affair: Balwani first got involved in Theranos in 2009 when he lent the company $13 million—calling it a ‘good-faith loan’. Within six months, he came on board as the Chief Operating Officer—despite having zero knowledge of biotech. But the lovebirds never disclosed their relationship to employees or to investors or the press. Amusingly, a 2014 New Yorker profile notes that Theranos investor Henry Kissinger and his wife tried to set Holmes up on dates. But to employees, the relationship was an open secret: “Holmes and Balwani lived together only four miles away from the office, and frequently arrived and left work together.” 

Twin terrors of Theranos: Balwani’s ignorance was patently obvious. He was clueless about the product and often mispronounced technical terms—claiming that Theranos’ invention “is going to be way up there, um, with—with the discovery of antibiotics.” Balwani’s real job was to act as Holmes’ “enforcer.” He terrorised employees suspected of disloyalty—and conducted internal witch hunts to eliminate anyone who posed a threat. Author Carreyrou says that Balwani “projected an air of menace” at Theranos, acting coldly and dismissively toward employees.

The weirdo lovebirds: As part of Holmes’ trial, a number of their personal text conversations were made public. At times, it was Balwani waxing lyrical: “Tired live for my baby,” “My love and devotion to you will lift your heart,” “Missing u in every breath and in every cell,” “World is so beautiful because of you,” and “There is no love for me like yours. Which is why it’s hard to breath [sic] without your breath near me.”

To which, Holmes would often respond: “Ditto.” Then again, she would often send him cringey poems like this: “You are the breeze in desert for me. My water. And ocean. Meant to be only together tiger.” To which, Balwani said: “OK.” 

Love or abuse? As Theranos’ dirty secrets became public, Balwani exited the company in 2016—and Carreyrou says he was ruthlessly dumped by Holmes:

“When it started becoming apparent to [Holmes] that she would have no chance of persuading people she was really trying to change the company's culture and fix its problems, she threw Sunny under the bus. She fired him and broke up with him. His departure was dressed up in a press release as voluntary retirement, but it wasn’t.”

OTOH: Holmes’ entire defence in her court case rested on one simple argument: Balwani “abused her emotionally and psychologically in a relationship spanning more than a decade”—which apparently “eras[ed] [Holmes’] capacity to make decisions.” 

Holmes in her testimony painted the picture of a classic abuser:

“He told me I didn’t know what I was doing in business, that my convictions were wrong, that he was astonished at my mediocrity, that if I followed my instincts I was going to fail, and that I needed to kill the person I was to become what he called a new Elizabeth that could be a successful entrepreneur… He would tell me not to sleep much, eat only foods that would make me pure and would make me have the most energy possible in the company.”

The sexual abuse: Holmes claimed they had not been romantic partners for the longest time:

“Once we started working together it was a very intense relationship and that romantic piece that was there at the very beginning died…I don't think it happened in one moment, but it was very clear we were colleagues.”

But then she also says this: 

“He would get very angry with me, and then he would sometimes come upstairs to our bedroom and force me to have sex with him when I didn’t want to, because he wanted me to know that he still loved me.”

Point to note: Balwani is slated to go on trial on similar charges of fraud—which will reveal his version of this toxic love story. 

The bottomline: We found this story interesting for a number of reasons. For one, Balwani offers a telling counterpoint to those other Silicon Valley success stories Indians prefer to focus on. Also notable: Holmes’ decision to defend herself as a victim of domestic violence—perhaps playing into stereotypes associated with patriarchal brown men and their white female victims. Even more interesting: No one seems to believe her, including the jury that convicted her.

Reading list

Vanity Fair and Bustle have the most details on the strange Balwani-Holmes relationship. Quint has the best profile of Balwani. The Verge looks at the details of Holmes’ defence. Business Insider has a timeline of the Theranos debacle, while BBC News offers a good overview. The Guardian examines what Holmes and Theranos tell us about Silicon Valley’s cult of success. This NPR audio segment looks at the gender debate sparked by Holmes’ fall—while Slate argues that her guilty verdict is a win for women.