What it’s like to work for Elizabeth Holmes

Erika Cheung was a 22-year-old biochemist when she met Elizabeth Holmes, inspired by the Theranos CEO’s vision of a world in which health care was affordable and blood testing was universally available. Within nine months, she was blowing the whistle on her employer.

In an interview with STAT, Cheung explained how she went from a “starry-eyed” admirer of Holmes’s entrepreneurial spirit to an agent of Theranos’s eventual demise. She also weighs in on how long her former boss should spend in jail, why the Theranos story has captivated the public, and the biggest outstanding question: Was Elizabeth Holmes a fraud from the very start?

“At lot of people disagree with me but I don’t think that was the case,” Cheung said. “I think she went in, at least initially, with good intentions. But she let her ego get in the way. She was more focused on being the next Steve Jobs of health care.”

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