Before ‘The Dropout’: Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwanis’s Real-Life Relationship Timeline

usmagazine.com:

Attention fans of The Dropout, Us Weekly has rounded up everything you need to know about Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani’s real-life relationship as Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews’ portrayal receives critical acclaim.Holmes met Balwani, who is 19 years older than the Theranos founder, when she was in China for Stanford’s Mandarin program in 2002 — the same year he filed for divorce from then-wife Keiko Fujimoto.

While the pair struck up an unlikely friendship, they reportedly didn’t begin their romance until 2004.Holmes dropped out of college that year to pursue a product that could allegedly run medical tests using only a small amount of blood obtained from a finger prick.

While Balwani wasn’t officially part of the company until 2009, John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup claimed he was advising her as he pursued his own business opportunities.

They reportedly didn’t tell investors about their romance.“[It was] very clear to me that they were running this thing as a partnership, and that Sunny was kind of the enforcer and Holmes’ older boyfriend,” the book stated, claiming one of his sources “painted the portrait of this fraud being run by a couple.”In her deposition, which was released in 2019, Holmes said: ”Once we started working together it was a very intense relationship and that romantic piece that was there at the very beginning died.