Previously on The Dropout, the SEC charged Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Bellwani with running an elaborate years-long fraud. Elizabeth settled without had been a wrongdoing. She was stripped of her control of Theranos and agreed to pay a $500,000 fine. The Department of Justice followed suit. Elizabeth and Sunny were now facing criminal charges and decades in prison if convicted. Sunny's lawyer vowed he would fight the charges. But where does that leave Elizabeth?
From ABC Radio and Nightline, this is The Dropout. Hi, this is Megan. Hey, Megan, it's Rebecca Jarvis in New York. How are you? I'm doing well. Rebecca, how are you doing? You're listening to Megan Long. She first met Elizabeth Holmes in 1995 when they started sixth grade together at St. John's Private School in Houston. Megan says news of Elizabeth's downfall ricocheted throughout this tight-knit community, where some of the wealthiest families in Texas send their children.
I mean, oh my god, did you hear about Elizabeth? Oh my god, her company is dissolving. Oh my god, she's facing criminal charges. Oh my god, I feel so bad for Elizabeth. I mean, the community follows Elizabeth's story, just like everyone else follows Elizabeth's story, but a lot close because we knew her and the shock and sadness of watching it all play out has just been, you know, just been huge for the community.
Megan reached out to me after listening to the first episode of The Dropout. She wanted people to hear about the polite, engaging Elizabeth, she knew growing up. Megan says of all her memories of Elizabeth, there's one that really stands out. Back in sixth grade, we were both on the track team. I was a sprinter, Elizabeth did the
600 or the 800 is 1600. One of those long races. And the thing that I remember the most is typically when you run a race, right, the thing that you're going to remember is the person who gets first place. You generally don't remember second place or third place, you're definitely not going to remember who came in last place. But here's the thing. To this day, Megan says she does remember who came in last. She says it was always Elizabeth.
The reason that that always stood out to me is because everyone would finish the race. And then all of a sudden, you hear the announcer say, don't cross the track. There's still a runner on the track. That runner was Elizabeth, but sure enough, she was not deterred by people who were laughing or people crossing the field. She was going to run that race and finish it and she was determined to do it no matter what anybody said.
When my team and I first heard Megan tell this story, the mood in the room completely shifted. Throughout this podcast, we've learned so much about Elizabeth had so many theories about what makes her tick. Now, imagining this young woman out on that track, so determined, what was driving Elizabeth back then? Ambition? Delusion? Was this a different side of her or a glimpse into exactly who she always was? We've heard from people, former employees who say she was
a bully that she was truly a mean person to them. Can you imagine that? No, I honestly, like when I heard that, I was like, oh my gosh, like this is like night and day that I knew Elizabeth because this is not Elizabeth that I knew growing up. Megan says in their school filled with brilliant students, Elizabeth appeared to move through life with a purpose. She was frequently carrying stacks of papers and appeared to be working
on something big. She was always very disconnected from the larger group of girls or just kind of in her own world. Elizabeth was either, you know, working on her dissertation or maybe she was learning her Mandarin, but she was always, you know, very intently pursuing something else. Do you remember if she had any close friends in school? She kind of just faded out with like, you know, the social aspect in high school.
So I don't know who her friends were at that point, and I didn't see her really with anybody. Big events like school dances because we'd have probably in high school anywhere from three dances a year, and she would never come to those. At lunch, she wasn't, you know, engaged to sit down at the tables and mingle with people. We had a room that was just dedicated to seniors, and everybody would just kind of talk to everybody because it was like a free
period. Elizabeth was never there, like socializing and engaging and celebrating that you've made it this far. You're a senior. You get to graduate. There was also her distinctive voice. So it was very mazely, and it would validate with high and low. So when she would talk to you, it would go up and down like, hi, Megan, you know, so it wasn't, it wasn't a very clear pitch as to whether it was distinctly
higher, distinctly low. So when I see, you know, when I've seen videos of her, her voice was really low, I was like, wow, like her voice got really deep. On a lighter note, Megan says Elizabeth had another claim to fame. She named dropped Lorenzo Lomis was her step uncle because her grandfather married from his mother who was a Hollywood actress. Lorenzo Lomis. Yeah. From Greece. Yes. Why could be Greece lightning? He's like.
Lorenzo Lomis plays the jock Tom. Danny makes fun of Sandy for dating him. That's why I'm so glad that Tom's such a simple person. Simple is right. Too bad his brains are in his biceps. He was also on a TV show in USA called Renegade. A quiet loner with some amusing quirks, a detached young woman. But not Megan says the woman we've known her to become today. It's a very big shock to the faint show in this community and big sadness in our hearts
that this is how it all played out. She may have been smart enough to feel a lot of these tendencies in high school that I didn't see or that her parents didn't see or the school didn't see. It just doesn't add up. So how could a dramatic shift like this happen? I asked clinical and performance psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader. She was described to us as someone who was nice and ethical. Does life and life experience potentially change our wiring? Does it change who we are?
This is a million dollar question, really. And, you know, I can't speak to any particular person without meeting them. But what I can say is that most people think that it's really a combination of our wiring and then what we're exposed to. Dr. Fader coaches CEOs and high flyers in the financial services industry. Kind of like a real life Wendy Rhodes from the show Billions. I want you to just commit that you're in it for the long haul that you will succeed.
Her character treats hedge fund big wigs helping them to basically get over themselves. You are a winner. You're in the special forces here. Dr. Fader says when we've fallen to stressful situations, it's possible we do out of character things. It's not impossible that in my mind any of us when exposed to certain situations could make poor choices. But for the most part we are who we are.
I say it's unlikely that someone who doesn't have the wiring to do it at all would make those poor choices, but I'm sure it is possible. And when it comes to leaders, some of the same traits that make them successful also make them more susceptible to crossing the line. They tend to be in some way somewhat narcissistic. An excellent leader is someone who is able to really have a high level of self confidence. There is a very thin line between self confidence and arrogance. But it's a fine line.
It's a fine line being able to ignore things that are important to other people like feelings or consequences. And doing it so much that you're putting yourself or other people at risk. Does success at a young age change how people are as leaders? I think that success generally breeds confidence. Sometimes though what I find is that someone has a tremendous amount of success. They don't proceed in a natural progression through developing the other leader skills that they would need.
Like empathy, social skills, motivation, the ability to be self-aware and self-regulate. Whereas if someone experiences more gradual success, they have more time to develop alongside with their career trajectory. These other social skills and self-awareness that can protect them against really complicated and potentially dangerous decision-making. Childhood friend Megan Long says it's still difficult to make sense of it all, especially when she knows what might be ahead for Elizabeth.
Can you imagine her in prison? Can I imagine Elizabeth? I can't imagine anybody that I know in prison. So, I can't imagine Elizabeth in prison. I hope and pray to God that everything happens the way that it's supposed to. And I can only say that sometimes people have to learn lessons in life and it's hard if those lessons are really difficult like prison. Martha Stewart's been to prison, you know, Jared Kushner's father's been to prison. There are a lot of people who go to prison.
I mean, there are people who go to prison every day who don't even commit crimes. So I think life is what you make of it and this is how her heart has been dealt and I wish her the best and I hope that it all works out. So how will it all work out? I wanted to better understand how strong the government's case is against Elizabeth. Will she go to jail? If so, for how long? What will her legal strategy be?
I sat with former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Pete Barara, who studied the charges and prosecuted similar cases. Okay, so let's talk Elizabeth Holmes. We met at his offices in New York just after he'd wrapped in an interview for his own podcast. Stay tuned with Pete. My first question? How hopeful should Elizabeth be right now?
I think the proof seems overwhelming and I think she will be convicted and I think her best bet is to plead, given what I know about the case and how she might be perceived by the jury, but just to give it, but my defense hat on for a second. Pete says Elizabeth does have one important thing going for her. She actually, I think, might be able to show that she ultimately was trying to make things right.
She actually had this ambition of creating this device that would have all these wondrous abilities. Right? So at the end of the day, she wanted to create this thing and she was devoted to it and along the way, it looks like she lied in order to get past the hurdle until she could fix it. But unlike some other fraudsters that my office prosecuted, like Bernie Madoff, for example, Bernie Madoff was a fraud through and through.
The perpetrator of a $65 billion Ponzi scheme that ruined thousands of lives. And there was never a thought in his head that later I'll make some money back another way and I'll pay everyone back. It was a true Ponzi scheme. I'm not saying that carries the day for her at all, but she's in a slightly different circumstance and some other people against whom a strong case can be made. What about statements like this technology is being used in the battlefield in Afghanistan, in hospitals?
So that's the other side of the coin. I'm like, I think, and maybe I have a bias because I used to be on the prosecution side. So when I read an indictment like this, I think it's very strong. You usually don't make precise and specific allegations of the type in this indictment unless you can back it up. How does her case compare to Sonny's? They're both facing the criminal charges.
My guess is that Sonny is in a better position because the defense in all these kinds of cases is that there was a mastermind and the mastermind, especially in a circumstance where all the evidence is going to be that she lied to everybody. This was the defense of a lot of people that we charged outside of Bernard Madoff.
There were other people who were accomplices who were a little bit more difficult to prosecute, and I think Sonny is probably in a similar position, although he's probably more entwined based on the romantic relationship. He came to the same as some other people and said I had arms-length distance and I did by nine to five job and then went home every day. They were probably talking about everything all the time. So he has that shortcoming in his defense.
He can say, maybe it's not going to be that plausible, unlike her, she lied to everybody. And Sonny's defense lawyer is going to want to say, yeah, look at all this evidence you've heard. I know the wool over lots of people's eyes, including George Schulz and Betsy DeVos and General Mattis. All these really smart people. She did the same to my client. But it doesn't sound like that's the direction Sonny will go in. At least not initially.
You might remember in the last episode I spoke with Sonny's attorney, Jeff Cooper-Smith. And you may recall, he said Sonny doesn't feel like he was duped by Elizabeth. No, that's not what is going on here. Mr. Balwani believed in Elizabeth Holmes and her vision for the company. He tried to execute that plan with her to make it a success. But no, he's not saying that he was duped. But pretz says Sonny's position might not stay that way for long.
Even though right now, Sonny and Elizabeth Holmes seem to be in sync with each other, that can change. And this is a feature of prosecution that is as commonplace as a judge's gavel. People flip. You know, you know, you know, kinds of people sometimes flip. Form of boyfriends and girlfriends. Elizabeth has something else working against her in pretzestimation. I mean, here's the other problem with all this stuff and why it's problematic based on what I've seen.
There are sometimes cases you bring against the CEO of a company. And it's a CEO who can claim that he or she was somewhat disengaged. I wasn't that involved with it. I had managers I delegated. Elizabeth may very well go this route. Remember, in her deposition, she claimed she didn't know or couldn't recall more than 660 times when it came to the particulars of her business. I don't know specifically. I'm not sure. I don't know exactly. I just don't know.
But as pretz says, from everything that I've seen here, she can't argue that. She was involved deeply, strategically, substantively in every aspect of the business and how the prototypes worked or didn't work because of her charm and charisma and personality. She personally sought out the investors. She personally sought out people who would be on the board for her being incredibly smart and being incredibly educated and incredibly sophisticated is harmful.
You have to wonder, in Silicon Valley, a place where so many founders are playing the fake it till you make it game. But Elizabeth make the argument she was just a symptom of her environment. This what about is him that we talk about in America these days where you go after somebody, whether it's your child who's stolen from the cookie jar and you say, well, my brother, you know, stole from the cookie jar yesterday, well, that's okay. I'll deal with him separately. This is not about him.
This is about you. And in a court of law, it's not relevant. If you were advising her, would you tell her to settle? I would tell her to plead guilty, but I think a good lawyer says, look, you're still a fairly young person. You have her whole life ahead of you. And you will maybe come out of this still relatively young.
But I think you have to have a conversation like that because trials are tough and prosecutors don't bring cases like this unless they really, really, really think they're going to prevail. There's something else, Preet says Elizabeth has to watch out for showing hubris. She might have to testify.
Not only maybe does she think that she is a good witness because she's been able to scam people before and she knows she can talk her way out of the paper bag, you think, well, all I got to do is convince 12 more people at the end of the day that I'm not a bad person. The danger for her is most witnesses think they are better than they are and they get crushed on cross examination. Unfortunately, if you're one of the many listeners hoping for some quick closure here, you might be disappointed.
How hard is this case going to be to prosecute? Well, you know, it depends on your perspective. On the one hand, it seems very obvious that there was a fraud and the allegations and the indictment are very specific, you know, lie after lie after lie, misleading statement, after misleading statement, right? But in any white collar case, you have to prove not only that the things happened, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
And this is the threat of lack of success and any kind of white collar prosecution. You have to prove what's in the person's mind. You know, Elizabeth Holmes and her and her first well boyfriend, Sonny are only guilty. If you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they intended to lie, that they intended to mislead. Bottom line, though, pre-thinks Elizabeth, if convicted, will face some significant time. If she loses, if the prosecution wins their case, do you think she'll go to jail?
I think it's highly likely, I think a sentence, you know, well into the 10 to 15 to 17 years. Does that mean she'll get that much time if she's convicted? Maybe not, but I think it's a substantial likelihood. Growing your business can mean big time logistical questions, like how are we going to keep up with all these local deliveries? Let Uber direct offer you a helping hand. With Uber direct, you take orders on your website, app or by phone.
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Just pay a fixed fee per delivery. Delivery just got better with Uber direct. And more at uberdirect.com. It'll be a while before we learn Elizabeth's legal fate. A trial is still a long ways off. And there's a huge amount of documents in this case, more than 16 million pages that need to be processed. That was all held up earlier this year by the government shutdown.
Elizabeth is due back in court on April 22nd for a status hearing, basically an intermediate step to look at how everything's proceeding. Until then, how exactly is Elizabeth spending her days? My wife, Wes Brzez, and she goes, I think that's for a second, I thought that was Elizabeth Holmes. Former Therino software engineer Michael Craig has an idea. He says he ran into her a few weeks ago over Martin Luther King weekend in Saucelito.
Michael and his wife Betsy were having cocktails at a bar, overlooking Richardson Bay. And I looked up and there's a woman sitting across from us and I realized she's looking right at us and it was Elizabeth Holmes, although she looked very different. How so? It's such a surreal thing I never thought I'd run into her again. But she was dressed in like a dark hoodie and jeans and didn't look to have any makeup on or anything. She looked very young and a little bit slight.
Her posture was a little stooped over and she was staring right at us. And then she got up and came over. And we stood up and I was completely taken by surprise. The last time Michael had spoken to Elizabeth was in 2017. His final day at Therino's. He'd been let go as part of a company restructuring. She came over and gave us both a big hug and started asking about us and introduced her friend as her fiance. And we shook hands and it was just really weird. So Elizabeth is engaged?
Apparently. At least that's what I heard. What was her fiance like? He was probably mid-twenties. He looked like a college educated. I wouldn't say hipster but you're minding me a lot of the duke boys that were Therino's short crop tear, handsome guy, pretty, you know, outgoing. We learned that Elizabeth's fiance, whose family has been very successful in the hospitality business, is eight years younger than she is.
He graduated from MIT where he studied economics and now works in technology in San Francisco. But I honestly wasn't that focused on him. Michael says he was especially thrown by what she said next. She said to her fiance, Michael and I used to work together at Therino's. And I was just cut off guard again by that because it sounded like she was one of the employees or something.
She said, you know, Michael was one of the most loyal people and he was unfortunately victim of one of the layoffs and we were very sad to see him go. And then she asked a whole lot of questions about how I was doing, how my wife was doing, and a little small talk and then she said something which was a little bit weird, which was, she asked if we could get coffee sometime and she told us that she'd really like to have us back in her life again. And I, you know, I didn't know what to say.
I didn't certainly didn't want to deal with that question. So what was her attitude like? What I thought was really interesting about, you know, this is the woman who had been on all these magazine covers. She used to walk around with such an air of confidence and certainty and definitely subscriber to positive thinking and things like that, positive psychology. And in the moment I saw her and when she came over, she seemed, I don't know, a little bit worn down.
But she didn't seem like somebody who has had done anything wrong. There was no apology or anything like that. There was no responsibility extended in anything she said. And I just thought that that was, it was upsetting, you know, this is somebody who claimed to be promoting transparency and have integrity and the reality is that neither one of those is true. Michael says Elizabeth didn't even intimate about the elephant in the room.
No acknowledgement she's accused of fraud, facing jail, or allegedly lied to so many people, including him. This is someone I almost worshipped, you know, as like a guru of, you know, technology and business and then to have that, you know, glass shatter of that illusion I held up of her was, you know, was traumatic. Betsy said afterwards that I was seemed pretty shaken by the whole encounter, but we made an excuse and got out of there, paid the bill.
And you know, when I walked around the corner, I just yelled out awkward because I didn't know what I was feeling. There was such a rush of emotion, a lot of contradictory emotions because this is somebody who I, you know, devoted and served for, you know, five years tirelessly, you know, and then all this stuff comes up along the way. And you know, she's facing a criminal investigation. And yet she's talking to me and she doesn't know if I could be a potential witness or anything like that.
So I thought the whole thing was very weird and I just started to realize coming out of it that there's a lot of stuff I have a dealt with in terms of the impact that that whole experience has had on me. In the end, I wanted to know if Michael could have asked Elizabeth just one thing, point blank, what would it be? Is it intentional? Or did you just screw it up? What do you think? I suspect it's both things at a certain level.
There's wanting something so badly that you're just going to do whatever means necessary, take whatever actions you need to take necessary because you're so convinced you're going to get there in the long run. Michael isn't alone. The question's still linger for many of the people who got caught up in Elizabeth's world. And Anna Ariola, the product designer who left Steve Jobs's apple to work at Theranos in the early days.
I think it's a term that Steve really coined the reality distortion field that's when said individual believes implicitly that what they are saying is infatically the truth that everyone else believes it to be the truth. Avi Tavanean, Steve Jobs' former right-handed apple, who originally put one and a half million dollars into Theranos and for a time served on the board. Wonders if they all fell just a little bit into that distortion field of Elizabeth's along the way.
Look, we had a situation here that created what's called FOMO, Theare of Missing Out, right? And everybody before you has bet on this, so you really want to believe that it's true. And then you combine that with this incredibly compelling story. Okay, you've got this really smart female CEO, right? Who's really smart? Who's going to make herself super rich and who's going to do a wonderful thing for the world, right? It is a great story. You want it to work. We all want that to work.
What Avi raises here is one of the central questions of this story. Because in order to have an Elizabeth Holmes, you also have to have a bunch of people and institutions fail. How much of that FOMO culture do you think plays into the culture here in Silicon Valley? It definitely happens. There's no question. And it's sometimes self-fulfilling because the companies that can raise hundreds of millions of dollars get to be the ones that stick around to try and make it a success.
Where they get to be the ones that spend a lot of money on acquiring large customer bases and then turn their end to success. And the ones that don't get into that mode, they never raise enough money and they're never successful, even if they have a better product. So what's interesting is it's somewhat self-fulfilling and it's almost a legitimate strategy to invest behind other successful investors just because they'll have the momentum.
According to clinical psychologists, Dr. Jonathan Fader, it's actually not that easy to get around this group thing. It's part of our DNA. We'll do anything that we can to get away from uncertainty. And this is evolutionary. When we sat around in older versions of our self and evolution and sat around in tribes, the one thing you never wanted to do is speak out against the chief. If you speak out against the chief, well guess what? You might get vanished.
And if you're vanished, well, you're basically dead. Without shelter, without the group, there's nothing to sustain you. We're relieved when we have a narrative or a story that we can buy. This is especially true, he says, when the person selling that story appears to be as remarkable as Elizabeth.
If you have a compelling, charismatic person who can talk in a way that can pull at the underlying values that people have and can make them feel safe and that we're headed in the right direction, even a message that lacks data or is somewhat flawed can be accepted. And this part is personal. Investors weren't the only ones who bought into Elizabeth. Much of the media was dazzled by her narrative and satisfied by answers that didn't always add up or made doubters look simple-minded.
We can and must do better too. Don't get distracted. Give our preconceptions at the door. Keep asking the tough questions and listening to the answers. Over the course of this podcast, you've gotten to know a lot of people, not just Elizabeth, but all the lives in her orbit. Obviously, this whole situation created a lot of collateral damage, but many of the central players in this saga have moved on. Now, they're building their own things.
Tyler Schultz, the original whistleblower, who risked so much to tell his story about Theranos. I think at the end of the day, everyone was concerned that we weren't giving patients the right results. Has since co-founded his own medical device company in San Francisco. It's called Flux Bio-Sciences. George Schultz, the former Theranos board member who apparently once sided with Elizabeth over his grandson, Tyler. As soon as she started talking, I did a double take.
As it seems, he had a change of heart. George Schultz responded to our request for an interview with a letter, writing, he commends Tyler for his quote, handling of the troubling practices he identified at Theranos, and that Tyler, quote, did not shrink from what he saw as his responsibility to the truth. Even when he felt personally threatened and believed that I had placed allegiance to the company, over allegiance to higher values in our family.
Ericka Chung, a former Theranos employee who was instrumental in telling this story, is now working at BetaTron, a venture capital private equity firm in Hong Kong. She says she's committed to growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I hope that people don't get completely discouraged and think that everyone who is in the healthcare industry and the biotech industry is somehow out to get them and to hurt them.
There are a lot of good people in this industry that really, really want to do, really want to do good. After years of working for Elizabeth, Michael Craig is now a senior architect at Hint MD. He's a startup in the medical aesthetic space. He also has something else in the works. Theranos, the musical. I've got a good structure for it. I do, and I'm going to have to start working on some songs. I have some good ideas for them though.
Anna Ariola, one of Elizabeth's early employees, poached from Apple, has since moved on to become a general manager and partner at Microsoft, specializing in artificial intelligence and research. And like so many, including the team of women behind this podcast, Anna is particularly disappointed that Elizabeth is a woman so many others looked up to, only to be let down by her.
It hurts me to know that so many women and so many female entrepreneurs in the world believed in her and saw her as this world changing individual and all along I knew she was ethically corrupt. Willis Gardner, an early skeptic, continues to teach medicine at Stanford and shares an Anna's regret. It bothers me that a woman was not successful. It bothers me that the women wanted to idolize her and that she fell.
It bothers me that a student thought she was great and it bothers me about the patients. So I get disturbed. She hopes future generations of students will focus their energy on learning over dollar signs. Without sounding too critical, it would be better if students would focus on service, humanities, arts and other things to broaden their minds rather than just focusing on becoming a multi-millionaire by starting a company.
Joseph Fuse, who is Elizabeth's neighbor in the late 80s and early 90s, thinks there is a particularly sad irony to the fact that Phyllis Gardner, whom he regards as one of the most brilliant scientists of our time, is in some ways that very groundbreaking female healthcare pioneer that he says Elizabeth just pretended to be. She's kind of too modest to pitch herself that way. I mean, if you take a time release tablet today, very good chance.
It's from the technology that Phyllis Gardner worked on. And what so sad to me in a way was, here's this woman who really is like this amazing inventor, right? And the press wanted youth and they wanted this sort of blonde hair, et cetera. And so they elevated Elizabeth. I always found it ironic and sad in a way because to me, the press is building up Elizabeth for trying to be what Phyllis actually was. Phyllis is in your home, not Elizabeth's machine.
Theranos wellness centers are long gone from Walgreens stores, but the drugstore chain says it's still waiting on Theranos to pay the settlement. To this day, neither Elizabeth, Sonny, nor Theranos have admitted any wrongdoing. Reed Kathrein, who represented investors in a lawsuit against Theranos, says the company should be held responsible for what he says are a gregious misdeeds. I mean, so many people wind up in jail for such little things. This is not a little thing.
Not only did they fool the investors, they fooled the media, they fooled patients, they fooled doctors. But Sonny's attorney, Jeff Cooper-Smith, is optimistic about the trial ahead. I'm very confident that when the jury hears a whole story, you're going to see an acquittal in this case, acquittals. So you think both Elizabeth Holmes and Sonny the O'Wani will be acquitted? I can't predict the future Rebecca, but from what I've seen so far, I'm confident that's going to happen.
And what will Sonny do next? You know, he's a very energetic, really brilliant person who has plans and dreams like all of us. He wants to continue to develop software. He wants to- In healthcare? I don't know whether it be healthcare. He wants to continue the entrepreneurship that he's shown in the past. Finally, Elizabeth. Sources say she's living in San Francisco, happily engaged.
She's often seen walking her dog, Balto, a Siberian husky she named after a famous sled dog who transported life-saving medicine across Alaska in the 1920s. And according to insiders, she's already planning a new company. It might even resemble Theronauts, as she told a packed house at a Forbes conference three and a half years ago. You will get knocked down over and over and over again and you win by getting back up. And I would start this company over 10,000 times if I had to.
And if history is any indication, Elizabeth Holmes, the dropout, the last woman on the track who refused to quit until she finished the race, is not going down without a fight. Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Bellwani did not respond or declined to comment for this podcast. Some material including court depositions were edited for clarity and time. The dropout is written and produced by Taylor Dunn, Victoria Thompson, and me.
Our editors are Chris Baroube and Evan Viola, who also created our theme song. Our researchers are Victor Ordonia's and Lane Win. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. The dropout is a production of Nightline ABC Radio and ABC's Business Unit. Our Nightline gentleman is the supervising producer and Steven Baker is the executive producer. Erica Avram runs ABC's Specialized Units. Thanks to the team at ABC Radio. And thanks to you, the listener, for joining us on this journey.
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