‘Popping Champagne:’ Theranos Whistleblower Celebrates Elizabeth Holmes’ Guilty Verdict

Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz reportedly celebrated the verdict of disgraced Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes by “popping champagne.” Shultz was a full-time employee of Theranos that quit after just eight months when he recognized that “it was clear that there was an open secret within Theranos that this technology simply didn’t exist.”

On Monday, a federal jury convicted Holmes on four counts of fraud and conspiracy, ending the lengthy trial in Silicon Valley of a woman once hailed by the media as the next Steve Jobs.

“This story has been unfolding for pretty much my entire adult life,” Shultz told NPR. The Theranos whistleblower added that after the verdict, his phone buzzed with a message from his wife. “It was a text in all caps: GUILTY,” Shultz said. “All of a sudden, it was just a weight was lifted,” he explained of his reaction. “It’s over. I can’t believe it’s over.”

Shultz added that the verdict was worthy of a champagne toast with his mom, dad, brother, and a few friends. “My family said, ‘Come on down we’re popping champagne. We’re celebrating,'” he said.

Shultz, who is now in his early 30s, had blown the whistle on Theranos when he was just 22 years old.

It all started in 2011 when Shultz was a college student, reports NPR. He was visiting his grandfather, George Shultz, the former Secretary of State who negotiated the first-ever treaty with the Soviet Union to reduce the size of their ground-based nuclear arsenals.

Shultz’s grandfather introduced him to Holmes, who told him about Theranos, a company she had thought up at the age of 19 in a Stanford dorm room. The concept of Theranos was to make blood testing faster and easier and less painful with just a finger prick, using an innovative device that Holmes invented called the Edison.

“She instantly sucked me into her vision, and I asked her, ‘Is there any way I can come work at Theranos as an intern after my junior year?'” Shultz told NPR.

He added that he eventually became a full-time Theranos employee, only to resign just eight months later, after noticing that something was amiss when he looked into the company’s supposedly revolutionary machine known as Edison.

“There is nothing that the Edison could do that I couldn’t do with a pipette in my own hand,” he said.

Shultz then found that when Theranos completed quality-control safety audits, it was running tests on commercially available lab equipment, rather than the Edison.

“It was clear that there was an open secret within Theranos that this technology simply didn’t exist,” he said.

This realization emboldened Shultz to blow the whistle on the company, making him the first Theranos employees to report troubling findings to regulators.

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