Is TheDropout based on a true story?
It is, and based on the first three episodes of the Hulu miniseries, it seems that The Dropout hews closer to the true story of what actually happened than your average based-on-a-true-story movie or show. As most people know, there is most definitely a real-life Holmes who started a company called Theranos that was based on faulty technology and ultimately ran into the ground. The Dropout is specifically based on a podcast of the same name about Holmes’ Theranos scandal that was released over the course of six episodes in early 2019. Because that podcast proved so popular, and because it was produced by ABC News, it was then spun into a 20/20 two-hour episode. While journalist and author John Carreyrou, who investigated Theranos’ faulty claims for The Wall Street Journal, is one of the real-life people portrayed in The Dropout, the book he wrote about the scandal—2018’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup—is technically not the basis of this miniseries. However, it is expected to serve as the source material for an upcoming Holmes/Theranos movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.
How did Theranos fool everyone?
In The Dropout, Theranos manages to secure a deal to roll out their technology in Walgreens stores as part of a new “Wellness Centers” initiative—which, as depicted in the series, is all the result of a seriously elaborate con job. Through some impressive maneuvering, Holmes and her team are able to circumvent the independent consultant Walgreens hired to evaluate the technology, while simultaneously drumming up a sense of urgency by making the Walgreens execs think they’re also on the verge of closing deals with CVS or Safeway. Ultimately, it’s Dr. Jay Rosan (Alan Ruck), the most enthusiastic member of the Walgreens innovation team, who convinces the rest of the group to commit to the partnership, despite having never seen Theranos’ technology. In real life, the deal with Walgreens played out very similarly. Walgreens did hire an independent lab consultant named Kevin Hunter (Rich Sommer) to verify that Theranos’ tech did indeed do everything they claimed it did, and just as in the show, he was given the runaround by Theranos and had his grave concerns dismissed by Walgreens. “Dr. J” was Theranos’ greatest champion and wound up being pivotal to the company securing the deal with Walgreens, and Theranos did take advantage of Walgreens’ competition with CVS to push them into agreeing to the partnership. Even little things, like Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (Naveen Andrews) following Kevin to the bathroom, the secret sushi lunch, and the awkward karaoke are based on real events (although in real life, Walgreens changed the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” rather than “What I Like About You” by The Romantics). The biggest difference between how events played out in the show and what happened in real life is Theranos’ dealings with supermarket chain Safeway. In The Dropout, Holmes initially turns down both Walgreens and Safeway, making them think they’re pursuing CVS and motivating Walgreens to in turn feel the need to chase after Theranos. In real life, though, Theranos partnered with both Walgreens and Safeway, and Safeway remodeled hundreds of stores to include wellness centers that were meant to include Theranos devices. However, the partnership never officially launched, and was dissolved in 2015.
How was Theranos’ fraud discovered?
In The Dropout, Theranos first crosses the radar of Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) when he gets a call from Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy), who says he got Carreyrou’s name from Adam Clapper of The Pathology Blawg. After contacting Carreyrou in The Dropout, Fuisz reaches out to Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf), followed by Ian Gibbons’ widow, Rochelle (Kate Burton), to round up incriminating information on Theranos and feed it to The Wall Street Journal. The three act as a central hub for the Theranos investigation, connecting Carreyrou to sources and documentation in their zeal to reveal Holmes as a fraud and drive her company out of business. In real life, while the three did indeed meet together and compare notes, and all of them eagerly contributed to Carreyrou’s investigation, they weren’t quite the merry band of informants that they are shown to be in the series. Each of them operated mostly independently from the others and were interviewed individually by Carreyrou. Still, they all appreciated having others to talk to who could see the truth about Theranos, and were also invested in that truth reaching the public. As for Clapper and his “Blawg,” they are indeed real; Clapper was skeptical about Theranos’ blood testing claims in a New Yorker article thanks to his background as a practicing pathologist and wrote about his suspicions on his blog. Fuisz’s son, Joe Fuisz, found the post and sent it to his father, who in turn contacted Clapper and put him in touch with Gardner and Rochelle Gibbons. Shortly thereafter, Fuisz was contacted byAdam Rosendorff—who goes by the pseudonym “Alan Beam” in Carreyrou’s book—a lab director at Theranos who was experiencing a crisis of conscience about what he saw as Theranos “putting people in harm’s way.” After speaking to Rosendorff, Clapper knew that he had a huge story in his hands, but as a blogger and not an investigative journalist, he didn’t feel equipped to handle it himself. In real life, it was Clapper, not Fuisz, who initially reached out to Carreyrou about Theranos. After that, Carreyrou would get in touch with Fuisz, Gardner, and Gibbons, as well as Rosendorff and a number of other sources. So while the order of events in the show is wrong, and Clapper’s role in the investigation is given almost entirely to Fuisz, much of the rest did actually happen.
How did Elizabeth Holmes meet Ramesh Balwani?
The Dropout shows Holmes finding a kindred spirit in the much older Balwani after they met during an immersion program in China. From there, the two form a friendship and, eventually, a romance, even though Balwani is in his late 30s and Holmes is still only a teenager. This is true, although simplified a bit for TV. While the series depicts Holmes meeting Balwani on her first and only summer in China, she actually spent three high school summers participating in the Mandarin program, and only met Balwani during the last one, right before leaving for college. Although it was Holmes’ third year in the program, Carreyrou writes in Bad Blood that she was particularly struggling that summer with making friends and being bullied, and Balwani was the one who came to her aid. The show also leaves out that when Balwani and Holmes initially met in China in 2002, he was married to a Japanese artist named Keiko Fujimoto. They got divorced sometime between then and 2004, and Holmes moved in with Balwani in 2005, so it’s unclear whether he was still married when his relationship with Holmes turned romantic.
Is Elizabeth Holmes an engineer? Did Elizabeth Holmes invent anything?
Was Holmes a genius scientist who flew too close to the sun, or a conniving con artist who tricked people into believing she’s more than she is? The Dropout paints her as an ambitious prodigy with a unique grasp of fluid dynamics who used her intelligence to fast-track her way through Stanford’s chemical engineering program. What it doesn’t show her doing is actually inventing or engineering any of Theranos’ machinery after coming up with an initial on-paper design. Is all of that true? Well, it depends on who you ask. Holmes did indeed manage to convince prestigious Stanford scientist Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin) to let her work in his lab as a freshman, and Robertson would go on to become one of her greatest champions, calling her a once-in-a-generation genius on the level of Einstein or Mozart, according to Bad Blood. On the other side was Fuisz, Holmes’ old family friend-turned-nemesis, who told Forbes, “The girl has no scientific education. She is not very intelligent. She is more con than substance. She was interested in ‘How do you con people?’ Not ‘How do you win with substance?’” The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. As evidenced by the downfall of Theranos, Holmes wasn’t the next Leonardo Da Vinci, but considering what she was able to accomplish before then, she also isn’t the idiot Fuisz makes her out to be. The only truth we can be certain of is that we can never know for sure what’s going on inside Holmes’ mind.
Did Elizabeth Holmes drop out of Stanford?
It’s well-known lore that Holmes dropped out of Stanford to build her company, but the first episode of The Dropout suggests that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to leave college. Holmes heads excitedly to a campus party as a freshman, only to later lie silently on her bed as girls whisper outside her dorm room that she was sexually assaulted. Shortly thereafter, Holmes drops out. A sexual assault on Stanford’s campus was reported to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office in the fall of 2003, and she later dropped out of Stanford in 2004 to start Theranos. And in her court testimony in 2021—the first time she ever spoke publicly of the alleged assault, and the first time many following the Theranos story learned about it at all—she implied that the event influenced her decision to drop out, saying, “I was questioning what—how I was going to be able to process that experience and what I wanted to do with my life. And I decided that I was going to build a life by building this company.”
How did Elizabeth Holmes get funding for Theranos?
After deciding to drop out of Stanford in The Dropout, Holmes sits down with her parents and presents them with a business proposition: Take the money they’d set aside for her college education and invest it in her new company instead. Surprisingly, her parents agree, and the money is enough for Holmes to start renting some cheap office space and pursuing her vision. The tradeoff is that the only space she can afford is in a dangerous area of town, and she barely dodges death at one point when a stray bullet shoots out the driver’s side window of her car, covering her in glass. This is all true, up to and including the shot-out car window. Holmes did indeed convince her parents to use her tuition money to start her company (then called Real-Time Cures before later changing it to Theranos), and while it was enough to get the venture off the ground, the best she could afford at first was a tiny office in Burlingame, home to frequent shootings. Fortunately for Holmes, she wasn’t there for long.
Did Theranos run out of money?
The Dropout portrays the early days of Theranos as a constant scramble for cash, with Holmes continuously pitching one group of investors after another while her employees racked their brains trying to figure out a way to make their technology viable. For The Dropout’s first couple episodes, it seems as though Theranos is on the verge of going under at any minute. There is likely some element of truth to this, since the technology Holmes was trying to develop was far from cheap. However, in addition to the $30,000 in tuition money from her parents, she was able to raise another $6 million from family friends during the company’s first round of funding, which happened before she ever started getting shot down by Silicon Valley investors. Don Lucas (Michael Ironside), who the show depicts as saving Theranos from near-bankruptcy, entered the picture during the company’s second round, followed by Larry Ellison (Hart Bochner).
Did Elizabeth Holmes change her voice?
One or the things Holmes is remembered for most? Her deep voice, which we see her gradually working on over the course of The Dropout. At one point in the series, as she tests out her newly developed baritone on the phone, a confused Lucas even asks, “Do you have a cold?” But Holmes seems undeterred from her determination to perfect her low voice, and the more successful she gets, the deeper her voice becomes. In real life, it’s hard to pin down precisely when Holmes’ voice changed, or what her reasons were for lowering it. In Bad Blood, Carreyrou writes that one Theranos employee, Greg Baney, conveyed that he once heard Holmes drop the facade and speak in a much more natural-sounding voice, leading him to conclude that she probably adopted the voice as a way to be taken more seriously in male-dominated Silicon Valley. This impression was echoed by other former employees and people who knew her prior to Theranos, who all say that she didn’t always speak in such a deep voice. ““When she came to me, she didn’t have a low voice,” Gardner told ABC Radio on The Dropout podcast. So while the miniseries had to fictionalize the circumstances of precisely when and why her voice dropped in pitch, there’s little dispute that it did.
Did Elizabeth Holmes dress like Steve Jobs intentionally?
Nowadays, anyone who pictures Holmes probably imagines her in a black turtleneck, similar to those worn by Apple founder Steve Jobs. In The Dropout, we see the origin story of that outfit, when newly hired designer Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres)—freshly poached from Apple—suggests to her that she needs to “dress more like a CEO.” Holmes takes this advice in a very specific way, cribbing the style of the one CEO she most aspires to emulate. This appears to be true. In an interview with Elle, Arriola recalled that when she first met Holmes, “She had this kind of spunky, frumpy Christmas sweater attire… It’s literally like… Stuff you see that has pixel art really poorly done.” Arriola said that she helped advise Holmes on how to dress more appropriately for her station: “I was like, ‘I’m happy to give you some style advice, because I love couture. Go for this, look at these.’” But of course, Holmes wasn’t interested in couture. “[Holmes] was enamored with the style and iconic silhouette of Steve Jobs in black turtlenecks,” Arriola said. So while Holmes took Arriola’s advice on upgrading her look, where she landed was probably not what the former Apple designer had in mind.
Did Theranos’ prototype ever work?
A pivotal scene towards the end of the second episode of The Dropout sees Holmes and her team pulling a frantic all-nighter in Switzerland before making a presentation to pharmaceutical company Novartis, trying to figure out why their prototype is no longer working, even though it was previously working back in their California lab. When they can’t solve the problem, she makes the call to substitute fake results from an earlier test for the demo, in order to make investors believe the machine worked. This is actually the incident that opens Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood. In the prologue, Carreyrou details a Theranos employee confronting Shaunak Roy (named “Rakesh Madhava” in the show) about why the team returning from Switzerland seems so upset, and Roy admits that sometimes, they faked results for investor presentations, in case the machine didn’t work. While Roy didn’t specify whether that was the case in Switzerland, Carreyrou wrote that the device had malfunctioned upon arriving in Switzerland, and that the employees with Holmes had indeed stayed up all night trying to fix it. When they couldn’t, a team in California sent over fake results for the demonstration for Novartis, just as it happened in the series.
Who blew the whistle on Theranos?
Arriola wasn’t the only former Apple employee to be recruited by Holmes; Jobs’ former right-hand man, Avie Tevanian (Amir Arison), also joined the Theranos board of directors in its early days. But like Arriola, who wound up quitting only a few months after joining Theranos (with the rest of her team following shortly thereafter), Tevanian quickly became disillusioned. The Dropout shows him confronting Holmes with many of his concerns, only to have her brush his questions aside. Later, Tevanian goes to Lucas with his worries that Holmes has no idea what she’s doing and that there’s no substance to any of her claims—armed with a stack of evidence supporting his accusations—only for Lucas to respond by demanding his resignation. As shocking as it is, this is exactly what happened. Tevanian really did bring Lucas hundreds of pages worth of documentation that all seemed to add up to the unavoidable conclusion that Theranos was in major trouble. But instead of considering what Tevanian was telling him, Lucas immediately asked him to resign. Given what we know now, it’s hard to imagine the chairman of the board waving away such a strong red flag, especially considering all of the due diligence Tevanian had performed before approaching Lucas. But Holmes had him convinced that she knew best, and for Lucas, her word was as good as gold.
Does Elizabeth Holmes speak Chinese?
The first episode of The Dropout introduces Holmes as an ambitious high school student who is learning Chinese in preparation for her upcoming summer study abroad program, and wows those around her with her impressive grasp of the language. This is true, although accounts differ on just how enthusiastic Holmes was about the program. In his book BadBlood, Carreyrou writes, “Midway through high school, Elizabeth talked her way into Stanford’s summer Mandarin program. It was only supposed to be open to college students, but she impressed the program’s director enough with her fluency that he made an exception.” However, according to Fuisz, learning Mandarin and studying in China wasn’t Holmes’ idea, but her parents’. “Elizabeth would call the house from China crying,” Fuisz told Forbes. “Noel would take the calls from Elizabeth and ask my ex-wife to pick up. Elizabeth said, ‘The people are dirty, the hotel is filthy, and I want to come home.’ But Noel would tell her to stop complaining and get with the program.’”
Did Elizabeth Holmes really fire and then rehire Ian Gibbons?
In The Dropout, after Gibbons expresses his myriad frustrations with Theranos’ practices and Holmes’ management to Robertson—who was Holmes’ former Stanford professor, and the one who had recommended Ian for the job—Robertson immediately reports his concerns back to Holmes, who promptly fires Gibbons. However, after Gibbons’ colleagues threaten to all quit, Holmes hires him back, but this time only as a low-level desk worker, not the lab director. While some of the details may have been slightly altered—for example, we don’t know exactly which employees threatened to quit—this account is largely accurate to what happened in real life. Ian’s new role at the company was a demotion from the head of the general chemistry group to merely a technical consultant, although he did still work closely with the man who had taken his job—a person Ian himself had hired only a couple months earlier.
Did David Boies really get paid in shares of Theranos?
During Holmes’ initial consultation with lawyer David Boies (Kurtwood Smith) in The Dropout, she mentions that he accepted shares of Theranos stock instead of payment for representing the company in their lawsuit against Fuisz. This is true; according to a 2016 article in The Wall Street Journal by Carreyrou, the firm Boies Schiller was granted over 300,000 shares of Theranos stock valued at $4.5 million in exchange for its work on the Fuisz patent case. Considering that Boies also joined the Theranos board of directors in 2015, it’s safe to say that Holmes was right in her assumption that Boies’ actions meant he must believe she was telling the truth about her company.
What really happened to Ian Gibbons?
Probably the saddest storyline in The Dropout revolves around Gibbons, the former lab director who is ultimately driven to suicide after being subpoenaed for a deposition in Theranos’ patent lawsuit against Fuisz. Fuisz hoped that, since Gibbons’ name was on Theranos’ patents alongside Holmes’, that he could testify that the patent Theranos was accusing Fuisz of stealing wasn’t materially similar to Fuisz’s patent at all. But Gibbons becomes distraught at the idea of testifying, worrying that he will either have to tell the truth, which will likely void Theranos’ patents and bring a lawsuit from the company down on his head, or lie and commit perjury. Later, when a Theranos lawyer tries to get him out of the deposition by telling him that he can be excused if he has a note signed by his doctor saying that he cannot testify due to health and anxiety issues, Gibbons believes that if he uses that tactic, he will never find another company that will want to hire him. Unable to see another way out, Gibbons overdoses on Tylenol mixed with alcohol and dies. This is tragically true. Carreyrou goes into more detail about Gibbons’ death in his book Bad Blood, in which he conveys that Holmes never even called his wife, Rochelle, to express her condolences. Instead, all Rochelle received was an email from Theranos’ lawyer asking her to immediately return any Theranos equipment or confidential information Gibbons may have had in his possession, such as his laptop and cell phone. Although Holmes mentioned in a short email to a small group of employees that a memorial would eventually be held in Gibbons’ honor, no such service ever took place.
What really happened to Brendan Morris?
When engineer Brendan Morris (Bashir Salahuddin) learns of Gibbons’ death, he seems to realize that he can no longer in good conscience work at Theranos. After previously leading the call to quit if the company didn’t hire Gibbons back, Morris ultimately leaves after sending a final email to everyone in the company paying tribute to Gibbons and listing his many patents. On his way out the door, he briefly encounters Tyler Shultz, who is just about to start his first day. When Shultz asks what’s going on, Morris only whispers, “Get out.” The real-life version of Morris is most likely Tony Nugent, who was hired to head up the second engineering team that was competing with Edmond Ku’s team, similar to how Brendan entered the show. Although Nugent wasn’t close with Gibbons, he hated that his death was going mostly unacknowledged by Theranos, so he took it upon himself to compose an email containing Gibbons’ photo and a list of his patents and sent it to a couple dozen colleagues who had worked with Gibons, making sure to copy Holmes. It wasn’t the company-wide email blast that we see Morris send in the show, but it would still have gotten her attention. Nugent was fired by Balwani in August 2013, three months after Gibbons’ death. Considering that Shultz didn’t start at the company until September of that year, it’s unlikely that the two ever crossed paths at work.
Did Elizabeth Holmes’ family really live in Richard Fuisz’s house?
In The Dropout, after Holmes’ father loses his job at Enron, the family is left with no money and nowhere to go. Their wealthy neighbor, Fuisz—who would later wind up deeply committed to exposing the fraud at Theranos—offers to let the Holmes family stay in his former house, since no one is using it. This is, in fact, true; Fuisz told Forbesin 2019, “When [Elizabeth’s father, Chris Holmes] came back to Washington after Enron failed, he was broke and came crying to us. He had no money. I was living in a new house a few blocks away and I told him that he could live in our first house in McLean, Virginia rent-free.”
Was Rakesh Madhava with Elizabeth Holmes at Stanford?
In The Dropout, Holmes is able to talk her way into Robertson’s graduate lab program by noticing an error in one of his lab processes, thanks to bribing her T.A. Rakesh Madhava (Utkarsh Ambudkar) into letting her see his notes by giving him a Cubs hat. Rakesh later goes on to become one of Theranos’ very first employees, and is instrumental in both developing and helping Holmes demonstrate the earliest versions of her blood-testing technology. This is both true and false. It’s true that a graduate student Holmes assisted in Robertson’s lab at Stanford went on to become Theranos’ first employee (and is actually credited as co-founding the company with her). It’s true that he helped develop and demonstrate the mini-lab for potential investors. It’s true that he developed a close friendship with Theranos colleague Ku, and that he ultimately departed Theranos shortly after Ku, all of which is depicted in the show. What is not true is that his name was Rakesh Madhava; it was actually the aforementioned Shaunak Roy. We don’t know why Roy’s name was changed for the show, or if there was ever a Theranos employee named Rakesh Madhava. Many ex-Theranos employees no longer list the company on their public resumés, for obvious reasons, making it hard to verify employment. But what seems clear is that Ambudkar’s character is based on Roy, who got way more than he bargained for when he was assigned Holmes as a lab assistant at Stanford.
Did Elizabeth Holmes really charm Don Lucas into investing without a working prototype?
Venture capitalist Lucas is portrayed in The Dropout as being instrumental to Theranos’ success, investing in the company based on Holmes’ charm alone without ever vetting their technology. He also is shown as setting up the initial meeting between Holmes and Ellison, which opened a number of doors for the company. The real Lucas was indeed charmed by Holmes, doting on her like a granddaughter, and even served as the chairman of Theranos’ board after deciding to invest in the company. Ellison was a protege of his, having made a fortune from his company Oracle. After investing in Theranos, Lucas hired a pharmaceutical executive named Diane Parks to serve as chief commercial officer, relying on her experience to help ensure the company was on solid ground. But soon after coming aboard, Parks realized that the prototype for the Edison, Theranos’ proprietary blood testing technology, didn’t work. On the Bad Blood: The Final Chapter podcast, Parks said, “I couldn’t figure out how this thing was working or if it was working because I never saw it fully demonstrated. So, I started working more closely with some of the scientists that were developing the tool and finding that we were a very long way from having a tool that would actually work.” From that timeline, we can safely assume that Lucas did indeed decide to invest without seeing a working prototype, since if the company didn’t have one by the time Parks came on board, they definitely didn’t have one before then, when Lucas made his initial investment.
Did Larry Ellison help Elizabeth Holmes by telling her to lie to investors?
During Holmes’ initial meeting with Ellison aboard his yacht in The Dropout, he advises her that she needs to “hustle” if she wants to land the big meetings with pharmaceutical companies that will line Theranos’ coffers. He explains that the “software was still a mess” when he landed Oracle’s first contract, but “I said nothing.” That seems to plant the idea in Holmes’ mind that she can simply promise investors working tech, even if it doesn’t actually exist yet. While we can’t say for sure whether this exact conversation ever took place between Holmes and Ellison, it doesn’t seem all that implausible that one like it probably took place. In Bad Blood, Carreyrou writes, “In Oracle’s early years, [Ellison] had famously exaggerated his database software’s capabilities and shipped versions of it crawling with bugs.” And Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle, reported that Ellison once told him, “Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” Both seem very similar to what Holmes would later do with Theranos. So did Ellison give her the idea to sell investors a smoke and mirrors routine instead of a working device, or did she come up with that strategy on her own? We’re not likely to ever get a straight answer on that, but given that multiple Theranos employees reported that Holmes frequently started sentences with “Larry says,” we can’t rule it out.
Did Elizabeth Holmes perform a clinical trial on terminal cancer patients with a prototype that didn’t work? Did Ana’s entire team quit when they found out?
While Arriola begins episode 3 of The Dropout excited to work with Holmes and help her realize her vision, the honeymoon doesn’t last long. Only a few months after Arriola joins Theranos, she is appalled when she learns that Holmes authorized a clinical trial of Theranos’ technology on terminal cancer patients. Unfortunately, despite Holmes’ insistence that this is how trials are supposed to work, Arriola can’t stomach the idea of using malfunctioning and unreliable prototypes on real people. After a heated confrontation at work, Arriola quits on the spot, taking her whole team with her. This is very similar to how things played out in real life. Holmes did indeed move forward with a Tennessee study of cancer patients, despite the microfluidic system in the device still not performing properly. Arriola was bothered when she found out about this, but rather than explosively confronting Holmes at work, she met privately with her and asked if she’d consider putting the Tennessee study on pause while they perfected the technology. Holmes refused, and told Arriola to consider whether she wanted to continue with the company. After giving it some thought, Arriola slipped her resignation letter under Holmes’ door and left, only four months after her first day. Shortly thereafter, the rest of her team followed suit. In his own resignation letter, one of Arriola’s team members, Justin Maxwell, wrote, “Lying is a disgusting habit and it flows through conversations here like it’s our own currency. But I really truly believe you know it already. And for some reason, I can’t figure out why you allow it to continue.” So while it wasn’t quite the dramatic departure portrayed in The Dropout, the Tennessee study was indeed the final straw for Arriola and the design team.
Was Edmond Ku fired on a day he didn’t have his car?
One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the first half of The Dropout comes in the third episode, when soft-spoken engineer Edmond Ku (James Hiroyuki Liao) is fired by Holmes. Soon after Ku pushes back on her decision to go forward with the clinical trial in Tennessee, Holmes hires a competing engineering team to take over for him, then has him escorted from the building by security. But Ku doesn’t have his car that day, so he’s forced to stand in the parking lot, helplessly clutching a box of his personal belongings. While it feels like leaving Ku abandoned in the parking lot must be a detail that was added for dramatic effect, this is in fact largely how it happened. Ku was indeed let go following his displeasure with the Tennessee study, and he was escorted from the building, although it was a human resources manager and a lawyer who walked him out, not a security team. And believe it or not, he did wind up stranded in the parking lot, since he hadn’t driven his car that day. After about an hour, he wound up getting a ride home from his good friend Roy, who quit just a couple of weeks later, similar to how his fictional alter ego departs on the show.
Did Sunny Balwani invest $20 million in Theranos?
Holmes’ precarious empire nearly comes crashing down in episode 3 of The Dropout, when Lucas calls a board meeting to remove her as CEO after being informed—again—that none of Theranos’ contracts have been completed, despite Holmes’ reassurances. While he wasn’t willing to listen when Tevanian brought him similar concerns, he does this time, and realizes that Holmes’ continued deception and misdirection is going to run the company in the ground. But before the board can officially vote on her removal, she manages to talk herself back into a job by proposing that they pivot from targeting pharmaceutical companies to retail. She admits she needs “adult supervision”—the exact thing Tevanian suggested to Lucas earlier—but proposes that the person to supervise her should be none other than Balwani, who she promises will invest $20 million of his own money to get the company back on its feet, as long as he can come on as Chief Operating Officer while Holmes remains CEO. And amazingly, the board agrees. Like many things when it comes to Theranos, this scenario seems absurd—after all, Lucas was holding in his hands numerous contracts that Elizabeth had lied about, and financial reports showing that the company’s books were a mess—but is at least partially true. Lucas did call a board meeting to remove Holmes as CEO, and she did indeed change their minds, although it took her two hours rather than just a few minutes, as depicted on the show. And Balwani did invest a large chunk of his own money in Theranos, although the amount he invested was $13 million, not $20 million. However, it’s unclear whether Balwani’s hiring, or his investment, was a direct result of that board meeting. He was hired on as COO in 2009, six months after loaning the company money, but none of those events have ever been explicitly linked with Holmes keeping her job. So while it’s plausible that all of these events tied back to the same fateful board meeting, we can’t be sure.
How did Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung meet?
New Theranos employees Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette) and Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-yong Kim) meet in The Dropout during Erika’s first day of work, when Tyler is assigned to train her. She says that he was recruited at a job fair, while Tyler was, of course, referred directly to Elizabeth by his grandfather, George Shultz. The two quickly become friends, and although they’re initially excited about the secret and supposedly groundbreaking technology the company is developing, they soon start noticing signs that Theranos might be hiding something. Of course, anyone familiar with the Theranos saga knows that the real Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung were two of the key whistleblowers responsible for providing John Carreyrou with much of the information that would appear in his article. In real life, Tyler and Erika were indeed close friends who met at Theranos shortly after they both started working there. Tyler likely didn’t actually train Erika, but they were close enough to share their concerns with one another, and eventually, the information they uncovered about Theranos. As in the show, Tyler quit first following Sunny’s poor reception of an email he sent to Elizabeth (although unlike in the show, Tyler was the sole author of his email; Erika didn’t co-author it with him), and then Erika quit shortly thereafter after Tyler took her to express her concerns to George Shultz, and he sided with Elizabeth.
Did Tyler Shultz really write and perform a song for Elizabeth at her 30th birthday party (twice)?
One of the most cringe-inducing scenes in The Dropout episode “Iron Sisters” comes during Elizabeth’s birthday party, when a newly disillusioned Tyler is pressured by his grandfather to perform a song he wrote for Elizabeth… and then Elizabeth likes it so much that she requests that he immediately perform it again. Believe it or not, this is mostly true, although as with a number of other moments depicted in The Dropout, the sequence of events was a little different in real life. Tyler did indeed write a song for Elizabeth, at his grandfather’s request, and performed it at her birthday party at his grandfather’s urging. But rather than an immediate encore for Elizabeth, the second performance of Tyler’s song came a little later on in the festivities, when Henry Kissinger arrived late and party goers thought he should hear it. In the show, Kissinger is there from the beginning, and is one of the folks asking George to persuade Tyler to play.
Did Sunny Balwani threaten John Carreyrou’s sources?
As the executive team at Theranos gets wind of The Wall Street Journal’s story in “Heroes,” the seventh episode of The Dropout, Sunny Balwani grows increasingly more desperate to shut Carreyrou’s story down. He even goes so far as to travel to see the doctors he suspects may have talked to Carreyrou, then issue subtle threats during their meetings. Through these intimidation tactics, Sunny successfully convinces several of Carreyrou’s sources to drop out of the article, leaving the journalist concerned that he may not be left with enough to publish. Although the specifics of The Dropout may not be entirely true to life, it seems as though Sunny did in fact attempt to intimidate some of Carreyrou’s sources into dropping out of the article. In “Bad Blood,” Carreyrou wrote that Dr. Nicole Sudene had felt threatened by Sunny after she declined to meet with him, and that Sunny and two other men had showed up at the office of Dr. Adrienne Stewart and pressured her to sign a statement claiming Carreyrou had misrepresented the information she had provided. When she’d refused, she claimed they threatened to ruin her professional reputation, leading her to ask Carreyrou to remove her name from his article. Two other doctors who spoke with Carreyrou, Dr. Lauren Beardsley and Dr. Saman Rezaie, both signed similar statements, leading Carreyrou to presume that they too were pressured.
What really happened to Mark Roessler?
Although the Theranos lab in the last few episodes of The Dropout is headed up by Dr. Mark Roessler (Kevin Sussman), the fictional character is likely based on real-life whistleblower Adam Rosendorff, who goes by the pseudonym “Alan Beam” in Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood.” In the show, Roessler initially meets with Richard Fuisz, passing him incriminating information on Theranos after Fuisz sends him a message on LinkedIn. When Fuisz asks for his motivation, Roessler says it is because they are both physicians, and took the Hypocratic Oath to do no harm. Later, Roessler promises Carreyrou a damning cache of Theranos emails, and even goes so far as to smuggle them out of the building, but gets cold feet at the last second and deletes them instead of forwarding them to Carreyrou. In real life, Adam Rosendorff contacted Carreyrou on his own, rather than first being contacted by Fuisz, and did supply Carreyrou with a number of emails that proved integral to his story. But like Roessler, he eventually experienced cold feet and told Carreyrou he wouldn’t be cooperating with the story anymore. The real Rosendorff was pressured to sign a statement swearing he wasn’t in possession of any Theranos information prior to leaving Theranos, rather than being dramatically chased from the building like Roessler, but both versions did eventually delete the emails under the advice of their lawyer. Rosendorff testified to being one of Carreyrou’s sources during the trial of Elizabeth Holmes in 2021.
Did Theranos really have their ex-employees followed?
As The Dropout races toward its conclusion and Elizabeth becomes increasingly more desperate to keep the truth about Theranos from getting out, Erika Cheung, Tyler Shultz, and Mark Roessler all become extremely anxious that they’re being followed. They’re each convinced that Theranos has hired someone to physically intimidate them, and are unsure whether Theranos would draw the line at physical assault, with Tyler going so far as to sleep with a knife under his pillow for self defense. As unbelievable as this seems, Carreyrou writes in “Bad Blodd” that it does appear that Theranos did indeed hire private investigators to follow Cheung, Shultz, and Rosendorff, along with Carreyrou himself. He also writes about Erika being hand-delivered a threatening letter from Theranos outside her office, with a new address that no one knew printed on the envelope, leading a terrified Erika to conclude that Theranos was having her followed. During the trial of Elizabeth Holmes in 2021, evidence confirmed Carreyrou’s suspicions, and he tweeted a series of documentation detailing Theranos’ actions. Ran out of episodes of The Dropout? Here are the 20 best Hulu Originals to watch right now.
