She pricked his finger, handled his blood, and lied.
Week three of the Elizabeth Holmes trial featured the prosecution’s first star witness, Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis. A four-star general before serving as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, Mattis was sold on the Edison machine—the desktop device Holmes claimed could process hundreds of medical tests with a single drop of blood—by Holmes herself. She demonstrated by personally drawing the general’s blood. She wore a white lab coat in such situations, her voice deep, her eyes unblinking, her hair drawn back in a tight Nurse Diesel bun. If Mattis had known the truth, that most of these tests were sent out for processing on traditional machines—in the underworld, they call this a “long con”—it would have “tempered my enthusiasm significantly,” such a setup being “useless to [the army].”
