Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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A Purposeful Life
lizabeth Anne Holmes knew she wanted to be a successful
entrepreneur from a young age.
When she was seven, she set out to design a time machine and
filled up a notebook with detailed engineering drawings.
When she was nine or ten, one of her relatives asked her at a
family gathering the question every boy and girl is asked sooner or
later: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth replied, “I want to be a
billionaire.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be president?” the relative asked.
“No, the president will marry me because I’ll have a billion
dollars.”
These weren’t the idle words of a child. Elizabeth uttered them
with the utmost seriousness and determination, according to a
family member who witnessed the scene.
Elizabeth’s ambition was nurtured by her parents. Christian and
Noel Holmes had high expectations for their daughter rooted in a
distinguished family history.
On her father’s side, she was descended from Charles Louis
Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded a thriving
business known as the Fleischmann Yeast Company. Its
remarkable success turned the Fleischmanns into one of the
wealthiest families in America at the turn of the twentieth century.
Bettie Fleischmann, Charles’s daughter, married her father’s
Danish physician, Dr. Christian Holmes. He was Elizabeth’s great-

great-grandfather. Aided by the political and business connections
of his wife’s wealthy family, Dr. Holmes established Cincinnati
General Hospital and the University of Cincinnati’s medical
school. So the case could be made—and it would in fact be made to
the venture capitalists clustered on Sand Hill Road near the
Stanford University campus—that Elizabeth didn’t just inherit
entrepreneurial genes, but medical ones too.
Elizabeth’s mother, Noel, had her own proud family
background. Her father was a West Point graduate who planned
and carried out the shift from a draft-based military to an all-

volunteer force as a high-ranking Pentagon official in the early
1970s. The Daousts traced their ancestry all the way back to the
maréchal Davout, one of Napoleon’s top field generals.
But it was the accomplishments of Elizabeth’s father’s side of
the family that burned brightest and captured the imagination.
Chris Holmes made sure to school his daughter not just in the
outsized success of its older generations but also in the failings of
its younger ones. Both his father and grandfather had lived large
but flawed lives, cycling through marriages and struggling with
alcoholism. Chris blamed them for squandering the family
fortune.
“I grew up with those stories about greatness,” Elizabeth would
tell The New Yorker in an interview years later, “and about people
deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and
what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on
character and quality of life.”
—
ELIZABETH’S EARLY YEARS were spent in Washington, D.C., where her
father held a succession of jobs at government agencies ranging
from the State Department to the Agency for International
Development. Her mother worked as an aide on Capitol Hill until
she interrupted her career to raise Elizabeth and her younger
brother, Christian.
During the summers, Noel and the children headed down to
Boca Raton, Florida, where Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth
and Ron Dietz, owned a condo with a beautiful view of the
Intracoastal Waterway. Their son, David, was three and a half

Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou