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Elizabeth Holmes Hit Up Rupert Murdoch to Kill WSJ’s Theranos Story

Holmes admitted to prosecutors that the way she handled the story was “a disaster.”

On her first day of cross-examination by prosecutors during her fraud trial, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes admitted that she tried to get News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch to kill a Wall Street Journal story into the company’s proclaimed revolutionary blood-testing technology. The jury was shown an email Holmes sent to Murdoch in September 2015, about a month before the story was published, in which she also tried to loop in editor-in-chief Gerard Baker. “As I’ve reflected on this, I thought that were I in your shoes I would want to know/be in the loop on this one,” Holmes wrote to him. “We are very much hoping that Gerard will meet with our team.” Holmes admitted on the stand the way she handled the story was “a disaster.” The story’s writer, John Carreyrou, told CNBC Tuesday, “I stand by every line of what I wrote.”