The Other Sunny Balwani

It was a spring day in 2018 outside the Newark, Calif., campus of Theranos. Within months, the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and its president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, would face felony charges of conspiracy and fraud and the doomed blood diagnostics company they built together would become a Silicon Valley morality tale. While taking a walk through a parking lot between two boxy buildings, Theranos consultant Shekar Chandrasekaran made a startling revelation to a colleague.

According to the colleague, a mid-level attorney at Theranos, Balwani had confided to his friend Chandrasekaran that he was still deeply in love with Holmes two years after their relationship had ended. In spite of everything that had come between them in the preceding years—a made-for-Hollywood saga that included a clandestine, decade-long affair; a highly unorthodox professional partnership; and a final devastating breakup—Balwani still felt protective of his ex-lover.

Chandrasekaran, who had enjoyed a professional friendship with Balwani for more than two decades, told his colleague that Balwani was concerned about Holmes. He worried that the people around her weren’t giving her the proper advice or taking good care of her. He had long rued the risks of Holmes’ insatiable appetite for publicity, and now it had blown up in her face.

As Balwani’s federal fraud trial kicked off at a courthouse in San Jose, Calif., this week, questions still swirl about what motivated the veteran tech entrepreneur to become embroiled in the most celebrated medical fraud of our time. Was it a crime of passion, or merely one of greed? Was Balwani, not Holmes, the master puppeteer behind the fraudulent operation, as Holmes’ attorneys asserted during her 2021 trial?

Or, as his own defense team is likely to argue in the days to come, was Balwani a deluded bystander, unversed in the technology behind the company’s fingerstick blood-testing device and unaware that he was helping to hoodwink its investors and customers? (Attorneys for Holmes and Balwani didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Balwani has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has strongly denied allegations of emotional, physical and sexual abuse leveled by Holmes during her trial last November. Chandrasekaran also declined to comment.)

Gaps in his biography still remain but new clues have emerged that offer a deeper understanding of the decisions that brought Balwani to the brink. Many details about Balwani’s peripatetic life—his early schooling in Pakistan, his college years in Texas, the recent sale of the lavish Silicon Valley home he once shared with Holmes—are reported here for the first time, the product of interviews with more than a dozen sources who have known Balwani at various stages of his life. These interviews paint a portrait of an ambitious, canny and street-smart man who was adept at bouncing between different ethnic groups and social settings, eager to leave a big mark in America, and convinced that his destiny, and that of Holmes, were spiritually ordained.