--- title: "Who led Theranos and sat on its board, 2003–2018" language: en canonical: https://dossiertwist.com/dossiers/theranos-inc/leadership/ as_of: 2026-10-21 keywords: ["Theranos","RealTime Cures","Elizabeth Holmes","Ramesh Balwani","Sunny Balwani","Walgreen Co.","Walgreens Boots Alliance","Safeway","Theranos Wellness Center","Edison device","Nanotainer","CLIA","Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services","SEC v. Holmes","United States v. Holmes","Fortress Investment Group","Theranos IP Company","Labrador Diagnostics","Partner Fund Management","Haemanthus"] --- # Who led Theranos and sat on its board, 2003–2018 **Question.** Who ran Theranos and who sat on its board, and how did the board change over time? **Answer.** Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 and was its chief executive officer until June 2018, when the general counsel, David Taylor, became chief executive; she remained chair of the board. From 2009 to 2016 Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani was President and Chief Operating Officer, and the SEC alleged that the two were the company's only senior managing executives. The 2010 board consisted of Holmes, Balwani, the venture capitalists Donald Lucas and T. Peter Thomas, the Stanford professor Channing Robertson and the former Monsanto chief executive Robert Shapiro; from July 2011 George Shultz brought in former cabinet members, senators and military commanders, who made up most of the ten outside directors listed in Theranos's April 2015 Florida report. In 2015 the company moved most of them to a board of counselors, which it retired at the start of 2017; the last directors listed in a filing, in May 2017, were Holmes, Fabrizio Bonanni, William Foege and Daniel Warmenhoven. ## Founder and senior executives - Analysis: Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, after leaving Stanford University, a business magazine reported. The superseding indictment, the Ninth Circuit and the HHS Departmental Appeals Board describe her as chief executive officer from 2003 until 2018, and the indictment adds that she owned and operated the company. She signed the 2004 restated certificate as President. Between 2013 and 2015, according to the SEC, she was paid a salary of about $200,000 to $390,000 a year, exercised about 53.7 million stock options and received the Class B shares that gave her almost complete voting control; she had never sold any Theranos stock. [src-016] [src-071] [src-072] [src-060] [src-086] [src-002] - Analysis: Balwani joined in 2009. According to the SEC's complaints, Holmes, then his girlfriend, asked him to guarantee a line of credit as Theranos was running out of money; he did so and became President and Chief Operating Officer that year. The SEC alleged that until his departure in 2016 the company had no other senior managing executives. According to the Ninth Circuit, evidence at both criminal trials showed that he oversaw the patient-testing laboratory and was the main contact for the retail partners, Safeway and Walgreens, although the precise division of responsibilities between the two was disputed. Their romantic relationship lasted from 2004 to 2016, according to the Ninth Circuit. The SEC put his salary for 2013 to 2015 at between about $99,000 and $200,000, and at Holmes's trial the defence showed a February 2015 email, reported in television news coverage, in which Holmes told James Mattis that she and Balwani wanted to be paid in stock options rather than salary; the email itself is not in the record. [src-002] [src-003] [src-016] [src-071] [src-013] - Analysis: The U.S. Attorney's Office said in 2018 that Balwani worked at Theranos from September 2009 and at times served as a member of the board of directors as well as president and chief operating officer. The dates of his departure differ by source. The SEC complaint and Theranos's own announcement place it in May 2016, while the U.S. Attorney's 2022 release says he worked there through July 2016; Theranos's May 2016 announcement said he would continue to support the transition through its completion. [src-002] [src-010] [src-014] - Analysis: Lawyers served as company officers. J. Casey McGlynn, listed in a lawyer directory as a partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, signed, as Secretary, the statement filed in California in early 2005 recording Theranos's 2004 change of name; the record does not say whether as an employee or as outside counsel. Heather King, a litigation partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, was appointed general counsel in May 2015 and still held the post that November. David Taylor, general counsel from 2016, became chief executive and general counsel on June 15, 2018, when Holmes stepped down as chief executive but remained chair; his firm profile says he led the team that secured $100 million of debt financing before winding the company down. [src-112] [src-086] [src-081] [src-055] [src-021] [src-089] ## The early board, 2004–2010 - Analysis: Theranos's 2010 Form D, which Holmes signed as President and CEO, lists, besides Holmes and Balwani, four directors: Donald L. Lucas, Channing Robertson, Robert Shapiro and T. Peter Thomas. Lucas, who died in 2019, was one of Silicon Valley's earliest venture capitalists and a former chairman of Oracle; Thomas was a managing director of Institutional Venture Management and of the general partner of the ATA Ventures funds; Shapiro, who died in 2025, had been chief executive of Monsanto and chairman of Pharmacia, according to an online encyclopaedia. [src-001] [src-092] [src-109] [src-094] [src-110] [src-095] - Analysis: Robertson, a Stanford chemical-engineering professor who taught Holmes, helped her start the company, was a technical adviser and its first board member, according to an online encyclopaedia, which also reports, citing records of the criminal case, that Theranos paid him about $463,000 from March 2015 to February 2016 and that he remained on the board until 2018. An investors' lawyer was quoted as saying Holmes paid him $500,000 a year from 2013 to 2017. These figures and the 2018 end date rest on the encyclopaedia alone; no Theranos filing in the record confirms them. According to the same encyclopaedia, Robertson defended the company after the 2015 newspaper reports and still believed in its technology in May 2018. His place on the board is independently confirmed by the 2010 Form D, which lists him as a director, but the later board lists described below do not include him. [src-083] [src-108] [src-088] - Analysis: According to an online encyclopaedia citing press reports, Avie Tevanian, Apple's former software chief, joined the board after leaving Apple in 2006 and resigned in late 2007 after a dispute in which he faced legal threats and waived a right to buy shares from a co-founder. No second document on his directorship was found, because Theranos's filings for 2005–2006 survive only on paper. [src-083] [src-097] ## The board of former officials, 2011–2015 - Analysis: George Shultz, a former Secretary of State and president of Bechtel Group, joined the board in July 2011, a business magazine reported, after Holmes was introduced to him at Stanford's Hoover Institution; the magazine added that by 2014 nearly all the other outside directors had come to the company through him. According to a 2018 federal court order, Theranos's first website press release, of July 29, 2013, announced James Mattis and Richard Kovacevich as directors joining Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry. The company's annual reports to the Florida registry list Shultz, Gary Roughead, Perry, Nunn, Kovacevich, Mattis and Kissinger as directors in July 2013, and add William Frist, William Foege and Riley Bechtel in August 2014; the April 2015 report lists all ten, with Holmes as chief executive and chairman and Balwani as President and Chief Operating Officer. [src-019] [src-103] [src-053] [src-073] [src-111] [src-113] [src-096] - Analysis: Their careers were in government and large companies: Kissinger was Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977; Perry was Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997; Nunn was a senator from 1972 to 1996; Frist, a transplant surgeon, was Senate majority leader before retiring in 2007; Roughead was the Navy's chief of naval operations until 2011; Mattis commanded U.S. Central Command until 2013; Kovacevich was chief executive of Wells Fargo from 1998 to 2007; Riley Bechtel led Bechtel Group, a holding company for engineering and construction businesses, as chief executive from 1990 to 2014; and Foege was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1977 to 1983. [src-099] [src-100] [src-114] [src-101] [src-102] [src-105] [src-104] [src-087] [src-053] [src-106] - Analysis: Holmes testified at her 2021 trial, as a national newspaper reported, that Theranos paid each director $150,000 a year plus 500,000 shares and paid Kissinger another $500,000 a year as a consultant. Mattis, a director from 2013, testified that he invested $85,000 and received $150,000 for his board service; he resigned on December 16, 2016, before his confirmation as Secretary of Defense, and said that by then he had lost faith in Holmes. A business magazine described the board on October 15, 2015 as twelve people, adding Holmes and Balwani to the ten outside directors and calling Balwani president and CEO, though his title was President and Chief Operating Officer; two weeks later Theranos said the board had already been reduced in July 2015. [src-022] [src-013] [src-040] [src-061] [src-011] ## Restructuring and departures, 2015–2018 - Analysis: At the end of October 2015, after critical press coverage began, Theranos told a national newspaper that it had reduced the board in July 2015 to five members, Holmes, Balwani, Riley Bechtel, Mattis and David Boies, and that the former directors, including Kissinger and Shultz, had become a board of counselors that would still advise the company; Holmes said the change had come in the summer. A life-sciences news site described the counselors as largely people with strong political and government ties. Foege and Kovacevich later returned from the counselors to the board. [src-049] [src-020] [src-051] [src-027] - Analysis: Boies is chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, which according to an online encyclopaedia he founded with Jonathan Schiller in 1997. A national newspaper reported that he became Theranos's outside counsel in 2011 after two investors approached him. He joined the board by October 2015 according to business press reports, or in February 2016 according to the encyclopaedia, which, citing newspaper reports, says he agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, raising conflict-of-interest concerns; the arrangement is not documented elsewhere in the record, and no response from Boies to that account was found. The same newspaper reported that he and his firm stopped doing legal work for Theranos in November 2016 after disagreeing about the strategy for the government investigations; a life-sciences news site reported that December that there was no indication he had given up his board seat. [src-107] [src-081] [src-066] [src-051] [src-049] [src-020] [src-040] - Analysis: On May 11, 2016 Theranos announced Balwani's retirement and the appointment of Fabrizio Bonanni, a former Amgen operations executive, with Foege and Kovacevich, to the board; Bonanni chaired its Compliance and Quality Committee. On December 1, 2016 it appointed Daniel Warmenhoven, a former NetApp chief executive who sat on the boards of Bechtel Group and Palo Alto Networks, in place of Riley Bechtel, whom Holmes called a shareholder, and said it would retire the board of counselors on January 1, 2017. Warmenhoven, who also sat on the board of the Tech Museum of Innovation and had been lead director of Redback Networks when it filed for Chapter 11, told a regional newspaper that he had come to know Holmes through Bechtel. A business news site listed the board that month as Holmes, Mattis, Boies, Warmenhoven, Foege, Kovacevich and Bonanni. [src-027] [src-018] [src-084] [src-115] [src-026] [src-017] [src-039] [src-047] [src-012] - Analysis: The last filing to list directors, a Form D signed on May 25, 2017, names Holmes as chief executive and director and Bonanni, Foege and Warmenhoven as directors; Channing Robertson is not among them. 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