Happy Halloween! Theranos showed up in a Pfizer costume

Today we learned more about Theranos’ kink for corporate cosplay. The company liked to dress up its own reports in pharmaceutical companies’ logos, to use the present tense when the future tense would be more appropriate, and to reiterate its favorite buzzwords in PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide.

Elizabeth Holmes’ lawyers, in defending her against the wire fraud charges that the government has brought, resumed cross-examination of Lisa Peterson, who worked for the DeVos family offices and was involved in approving their investment in the company. (Family offices are a rich people thing — an investment arm for all that sweet, sweet money.) The defense tried to discredit Peterson’s testimony from last week about a key Pfizer memo, which she said was key to thinking the company was onto something big.

The only problem? Pfizer didn’t write it. A former scientist at the company testified that Theranos changed a report the blood-testing startup had made to include the unauthorized use of the Pfizer logo. Pfizer’s actual findings were that Theranos’ conclusions in that report were “not believable,” the former Pfizer scientist had testified. But Peterson didn’t know that, and had relied on the memo as real validation.

Homes’ defense attorney Lance Wade pointed out that Theranos’ physical address and website were at the bottom of that Pfizer memo, in the footer. The text of the footer was considerably smaller than the Pfizer logo at the top of the page, suggesting the relative importance of each piece of information.

When the prosecution got a chance to talk with Peterson again, they asked her if the footer information would have convinced her the memo wasn’t from Pfizer. No, she said — the logo on the top was big. When she and her colleagues were considering an investment, “we really relied on the fact that they had been doing work for pharmaceutical companies and the government for years,” she said.

This was how we wound up talking about verb tenses. After establishing that Peterson knows what the future is, the prosecution went through some Theranos slides. “Theranos proprietary technology runs comprehensive blood tests from a finger stick,” one read. “Runs” is present tense and indicates that the tests are currently happening.

In fact we ran through several slides to discuss verb tenses — all of which were present or past, not future. During the cross-examination, Wade had returned to an idea he’d floated earlier in the trial: that the investors in Theranos were sophisticated, and that they’d even signed paperwork saying that Theranos was a speculative investment. The implication seemed to be that Theranos wasn’t devious — Peterson was just sloppy, and Theranos was promising what it would do in the future.

But the language in the presentation undercut that idea. Somewhere, a grammarian rejoiced.

After Peterson left the stand, we were treated to more Big Pharma testimony, this time from Constance…