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Elizabeth Holmes speaking at the Fortune Global Forum in 2015, around the time Theranos was under increasing pressure to deliver results from its ill-fated Edison testing device. (credit: Fortune Global Forum / Flickr)
James Mattis, the retired general and former defense secretary, took the stand yesterday in the criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes, detailing how his faith in the company plummeted when a Wall Street Journal expose revealed that Theranos had been performing tests on third-party equipment.
“There just came a point where I didn’t know what to believe about Theranos anymore,” he said.
When Mattis first met Holmes in 2011 in San Francisco, he was taken by her vision and believed it could become a critical tool for the military. Later, she gave him a private demonstration, pricking his finger and showing him the company’s Edison device.