Elizabeth Holmes was asked this question, she immediately said, I want to be a billionaire.

And she succeeded. Elizabeth would become the youngest self-made female billionaire after starting a company called Theranos that claimed it was going to revolutionize healthcare and change the world. The company became worth around $9 billion, and Elizabeth was on the cover of magazines being hailed as the next Steve Jobs. The only problem is it was all a lie. This is the story of why and how Elizabeth Holmes scammed her way to the top, and how it all came crashing down.

At the age of just 19, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to start her own business. It was originally called Real Time Cures, but Elizabeth changed the name after worrying people would be sceptical of the word cures, and she certainly didn't want to attract any suspicion. So she instead renamed it Theranos, a combination of the words therapy and diagnosis. Elizabeth had a phobia of needles, and had a vision where you could simply prick your finger and with a single drop of blood test for hundreds of different diseases. Since

Elizabeth came from a well-connected family, she was able to raise some initial money to get the company up and running to pursue this idea. She was also a very persuasive saleswoman, and investors were drawn in by her vision and confidence.

What was noticeable, though, is that people who invested did not have medical backgrounds.

In fact, some of the experts in this field that she spoke to specifically warned her that her idea most likely wasn't even possible. But Elizabeth ignored those warnings, and began hiring a team of scientists to help her. Unsurprisingly, progress on this revolutionary new blood testing device was a lot slower than she'd hoped. So she demanded that research start happening 24-7, meaning some employees would have to start working through the night.

The lab manager thought this was a bad idea, as they were already so overworked. So Elizabeth hired a second team and pitted them against each other. The team that made the least progress would be fired.

By 2006, the engineers had created a prototype machine called the Edison. Here's how it worked. You put a drop of blood on a small cartridge and slide it into the machine, which runs the test. The data is then wirelessly transmitted via the internet to a lab, where it's analysed and then a report is sent back. Basically, the machine would make blood tests much faster, cheaper, easier, and all from a portable device you could use in the comfort of your own home. At least, that's what the machine claimed to do. But it very rarely worked, and had an extremely high error rate. It was clear to everyone working on the machine that it needed a lot more work before it was ready.

The problem was that by this point, Theranos had burnt through its initial funding, and they needed more money fast. So Elizabeth began sweet-talking more investors, bragging about this revolutionary new machine they'd created, and claiming that it worked perfectly.

When investors asked to come see the machine in action, Elizabeth created an elaborate deception so they didn't realise how faulty the machine was.

When the investors returned to the lab to see their results, they just assumed the machine had worked perfectly. But the test hadn't even been done using the machine. The demonstration was all a sham. But the investors were fooled. Many of them were rich older men who seemed especially taken in by Elizabeth. When the company's financial officer found out about this, he told Elizabeth they had to stop doing fake demonstrations because it was misleading investors to think the machine worked much better than it really did.

And not just that, Elizabeth had also been asking him to significantly increase the revenue to make the company's finances look much better than they really were. When the financial officer confronted Elizabeth about all this, her expression immediately turned ice cold, and she told him he should leave right now. And she didn't mean leave her office, she meant leave the company, for daring to push back against what she was doing, he was fired.

And to make things even worse, Elizabeth never hired another CFO to replace him, meaning there was nobody to question the absurd revenue predictions she was giving to investors. So she could easily make up whatever numbers she wanted. And it worked, Theranos raised yet more millions of dollars in funding. However, the chief financial officer was just one of many in a long line of employees to get fired from the company.

For example, when Elizabeth decided to start doing a trial of the Edison machine on a group of terminal cancer patients, several employees came to her to tell her she shouldn't be doing this since the machine was constantly breaking and giving wildly inaccurate results.

And they said it wasn't fair to use real patients as guinea pigs. But she continued with the trial anyway, and anyone who spoke out against her in any way was fired. When someone questioned her, she took it as disloyalty, and would stare at them without blinking until they broke the silence.

Because of this culture of firing anyone who raised concerns, staff turnover was ridiculously high, and Elizabeth ended up being surrounded by yes men who had blind loyalty to her, or people who were simply too terrified to speak up. For example, the company hired quite a few workers from overseas who had a working visa, and would have to leave the country if they got fired, so they didn't speak up about their concerns.

It actually wasn't Elizabeth who did most of the firing though. Instead, it was the number 2 in command at the company, a man named Sonny Balwani. He'd come from a software background, so knew very little about medicine, and would often randomly repeat technical terms he overheard to make it sound like he knew what was going on. The reason he was second in command was because him and Elizabeth were in a relationship.

But this was yet another secret. In fact, Elizabeth outright lied to the board about this, since she knew that hiring her partner for the second in command role was a clear conflict of interests.

Sonny had met Elizabeth when she was just 18 years old, and he was 37, and they'd been dating ever since. However, Sonny was described by employees as a tyrant. He was brutal, aggressive and intimidating to employees. He watched everyone on CCTV to check how long they were working, and angrily shouted at them if they weren't working lots of overtime.

When he found out one employee who had a family was only working a minimum of 8 hours a day, he told him he'd fix him. He made several employees cry with his interrogations and abuse. He tracked everything they did, looking through their browsing history, and even installing a keylogger on their computers to track every word they typed, including the company's receptionist. This was all part of the company's insanely secretive culture.

Employees all had to sign non-disclosure agreements when they joined, in fact anyone who even entered the Theranos building had to sign one, and would be accompanied at all times by security guards, even to the bathroom. Employees also weren't meant to mention

Theranos on their LinkedIn bio, or even talk to their families about what they did. Theranos had even blocked the chat feature on the company's computers, so you couldn't message co-workers on other teams, meaning the company was very siloed off and divided. This was extremely impractical because it meant the chemistry team and the engineering team weren't in communication, which massively slowed research down. Theranos constantly claimed that this secrecy was simply to protect trade secrets, but in reality it was to cover up all the lies about the state of their technology and the way the company was being run.

And when anyone was fired, or if they quit, which also happened very frequently, they were forced to sign yet another non-disclosure agreement confirming they wouldn't talk about anything at all that had happened whilst at Theranos. They couldn't even speak to any of their colleagues on their way out, they had to leave immediately. Theranos had hired one of the top law firms, and threatened to sue anyone who mentioned anything about what they'd seen at the company. Most people were just relieved to get out of there, so they reluctantly signed whatever they wanted to avoid more legal threats.

As a precaution, Sonny would also ask the head of IT to dig up dirt on employees that could be used as leverage against them in future if they ever spoke out.

There was one incident where an employee refused to sign an NDA when he quit though, and Sonny called the cops on him, claiming he'd taken company property. But when the police arrived to ask what he'd actually stolen, Sonny blurted out, he stole property, in his mind.

So to summarise, it was an anxious, paranoid work environment. And yet, despite that, many in the company believed they truly were working towards something revolutionary. Elizabeth constantly reminded employees how impactful their technology would be in making tests more accessible to everyone. It would help detect a variety of diseases, including cancer, and they're saving lives. It was a strong driving mission, and Elizabeth had them all convinced they were going to change the world.

And so, whilst many employees did have concerns that the device they'd created still wasn't working the way Elizabeth claimed it did, obviously Theranos wouldn't actually start letting the general public use these machines until they were properly working. Right?

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In 2013, Theranos announced a partnership with Walgreens and Safeway, where they would start offering Theranos blood tests in their stores. For the first time, the general public was going to be able to use Theranos' machine. Elizabeth seemed to expect the machines would be fully working by the time they launched in stores, but they weren't. They were still breaking and producing inaccurate results. Did this stop Elizabeth from going ahead?

Absolutely not. Walgreens and Safeway were putting up a lot of money for this deal, a lot of which Theranos had already spent. Plus, by rolling out their machines in stores, it helped Elizabeth to raise around $400 million more from investors, who were now even more convinced that everything with the company seemed to be going great. Their logic was that there's no way Theranos would be rolling out blood tests in stores unless their technology worked just as well as they said it did. So wealthy investors threw yet more money in without asking too many questions, because they didn't want to miss out on investing in such a seemingly revolutionary company. And because many of these investors were high profile names like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family, it gave Theranos even more credibility.

Now, the idea with this deal with Walgreens and Safeway was they'd set up Theranos booths in their store where people could get a blood test done with just a prick of their finger, and essentially choose from a menu of which things they wanted to test for. However, this had meant to begin in 2011, but because the machines didn't work properly yet, Elizabeth kept trying to stall for time. There was excuse after excuse to delay the launch date, often for completely bizarre reasons, like she once said they were behind schedule because of an earthquake in Japan, even though that had no impact on their business.

But anyway, after almost 2 years of delays, eventually Elizabeth couldn't stall any longer and she had to make a decision. Admit the technology didn't work and lose the deal with Walgreens and Safeway, which would mean refunding many millions of dollars, or just put the faulty machines in stores and hope it somehow all works out.

This was a turning point. Up until now, Elizabeth had deceived investors, but now by letting the general public use these faulty Theranos machines, she was literally putting lives at risk. If someone got a blood test done on a Theranos machine and it gave the wrong results, it could be fatal. They can either be diagnosed with something they don't have, or think their results are fine, but really, they have a serious issue.

But Elizabeth pressed on anyway, and Walgreens and Safeway started offering Theranos blood tests in their stores. Of course, because the machines weren't working properly, Theranos couldn't get approval from regulators for in-store testing. So as a workaround, instead of actually doing the blood test in store like Elizabeth had promised Walgreens and

Safeway they would do, Theranos instead simply collected the blood in store and physically sent it off to a nearby lab they'd set up. This loophole meant they didn't need to go through the same regulatory checks.

But not just that, one of the biggest selling points of Theranos was meant to be that you only needed a small drop of blood from a finger prick. But when people actually arrived to get their blood tested, they often had their blood taken with a syringe the traditional way. And whereas the results were supposed to be ready in just a few hours, instead the results often took weeks. Basically, the whole thing was advertised as some revolutionary experience, yet it seemed just like a normal blood test. And the reason for that is it was just a normal blood test.

In order to give the perception everything was going fine, Theranos were taking normal blood samples and using third-party machines from other companies to do most of the blood tests. But because they were shipping the blood off to a private lab, people didn't realise Theranos were hardly even using their own technology. Theranos had promised their machine could perform 192 different tests, but in reality, it could only perform 12.

In fact, it was later discovered that over half of the tests they promised weren't even theoretically possible, and of the 12 things their machine could test for, most didn't work very well.

So Theranos was performing tests on third-party machines and pretending it was their own results.

And because of Elizabeth's insistence on using a small amount of blood, they had to dilute the blood samples to be able to run them on the commercial testing machines, which reduced the accuracy of the results.

But it gets much worse. The lab Theranos had set up near the stores to process the blood samples had been very hastily put together, and many of the staff they'd hired were very inexperienced. The people who were more experienced tended to quit or get fired for criticising the way things were done. For example, when one lab director quit over concerns that blood samples weren't being handled properly, they were replaced with a dermatologist.

One of the biggest problems was that in order to send the blood samples from the stores to the lab, Theranos was simply using FedEx, and this meant parcels often overheated, causing the blood to clot. So not only were Theranos completely lying about how they were doing these tests, they weren't even doing the tests properly.

Very soon, people started noticing abnormal test results. For example, one young healthy person got results back implying he had cancer. But when he went and got the blood test repeated by his actual doctor, his results were perfectly fine. Elizabeth was literally putting patients' lives at risk by sending out incorrect results, and yet they pressed on in order to keep up the pretense that everything was working fine. Theranos was now live in stores in Arizona, with plans to roll out all across America soon, and then the entire world.

And yet, whilst internally in the Theranos labs there was chaos, externally, Elizabeth was securing yet more funding from investors and starting to gain publicity and fame. In 2014, Forbes named Elizabeth Holmes the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, worth $4.5 billion, because she owned around half of Theranos' shares, which was now being valued at $9 billion. Which raises a very simple question, how the hell was she getting away with this?

To find out the answer to that, click right here to watch the second part of this Theranos miniseries. I'll see you there in part 2.