Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani went to elaborate lengths to keep their 12-year romance a secret while running Theranos—lying to investors, most employees, and press to shield the fact that Holmes, the company’s founder and CEO, was dating and living with Balwani, the company’s second-in-command. This, of course, was not the largest lie that Holmes and Balwani, who is nearly 19 years her senior, told in their troublesome quest to build a billion-dollar business—but it certainly would have been of interest to investors, who likely would have flagged it as being a conflict of interest. The first three episodes of The Dropout, now out on Hulu, trace this real-life relationship and the way it affected Holmes and the ill-fated start-up.
Their partnership became even more interesting in 2021, about five years after it ended. During her trial for fraud, after years of strategic silence, Holmes volunteered her version of the story in order to help build a case against her longtime boyfriend—who she claimed had emotionally and sexually abused her, and manipulated her into mismanaging the company. (Balwani has vehemently denied these allegations through his lawyer.) In an attempt to counter this argument, the government released hundreds of text messages between the Theranos executives, revealing just how much their relationship blurred personal and professional lines.
Speaking to Vanity Fair’s Joy Press, Dropout star Amanda Seyfried said that the text messages—which were released once she was filming Hulu’s series, in which she stars as Holmes—were “incredibly informative,” not to mention “juicy AF.”
“[The texts] really illustrated the dynamic between Sunny and Elizabeth so beautifully,” said Seyfried. “They were—there’s no nonjudgmental way to describe it—they were just so weird. And we were able to put these [conversations] in the script. The only weird thing about it was that I was speaking things that were texted, like: ‘We will transcend!’ Some of it was really beautiful and heartbreaking, and some of it was just wacky.… And then I’m speaking private dialogue meant for the man she was romantic with and defrauding people with, and it’s all so Twilight Zone-y, right?”
In an attempt to understand the unusual relationship between Holmes and Balwani, we’ve scoured the released text messages, Holmes’s testimony, and John Carreyrou’s bombshell reporting in the book Bad Blood, among other sources.
Their first meeting: Holmes was only 18 and still a high school student when she met Balwani, then 37, in Beijing in 2002. Holmes was taking part in Stanford’s Mandarin program—she was gifted enough as a high school student to be accepted into the college program, according to Carreyrou—and had been bullied by other students. “Sunny, the lone adult among a group of college kids, had stepped in and come to her aid,” reported Carreyrou.
Balwani was still married at the time, but his Silicon Valley pedigree appealed to Holmes. Balwani, who was born in Pakistan and raised in India, had been a software engineer for Lotus and Microsoft, and the president and chief technology officer of commercebid.com. When the company sold, Balwani collected over $40 million.
During her trial last year, Holmes remembered, “I understood that he’d been a really successful businessperson, that he worked with Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft. I talked to him about wanting to start a company, and a company that I tried to build in high school, and I asked for his advice.”
The beginning of their romantic relationship: When she was studying at Stanford the following school year, Holmes said, Balwani would email her. As depicted in The Dropout, Holmes left college during her sophomore year, in March 2004, to focus on the company that became Theranos. By July 2005, the relationship had escalated so much that Holmes was living with Balwani in his Palo Alto condominium, according to Bad Blood. Before September 2009, when Balwani joined Theranos in an official capacity, Balwani was advising Holmes behind the scenes.
Balwani’s confounding role at Theranos: Balwani was officially hired by Theranos in 2009 as president and chief operating officer, in spite of his lack of medical experience and “at least one red flag” on his legal record, according to Carreyrou:
According to Nick Bilton’s reporting on Theranos for Vanity Fair, Balwani became a looming presence in the Theranos office, enforcing extreme secrecy and the siloing of employees.