The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess

Over the past few years, when media outlets reached out to Theranos about whether its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes, would have time to sit for an interview, her P.R. team generally responded with two questions: What time and where? Holmes was a star. She bounced between TV networks like a politician giving a stump speech. She sat across from tech bloggers, reporters, and TV cameras who slurped up her delectable story—that she had come up with Theranos, her blood-testing company, as a Stanford freshman who was fearful of needles—and they largely regurgitated it, sometimes beat for beat. Yet in April of 2015, when John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter with The Wall Street Journal, reached out for an interview with Holmes, he said he got a very different response.