The book makes the case that Elizabeth Holmes was a capable practitioner of the "reality-distortion field" and was able to use her charisma, and Theranos's purported humanitarian mission, to persuade enough of the right people. For example, former Safeway CEO Steve Burd, who committed the company to $350M in renovations to accommodate Theranos "Wellness Centers". Burd remained confident that Holmes was legit (and had been vetted by others), even after Theranos missed every deadline. He even brushed off how Theranos's test erroneously diagnosed a Safeway senior executive with prostate cancer.

> When questions or issues came up that had to be taken back to Theranos, he would pipe up with what became a refrain: “I’ll talk to Elizabeth about it.” Larree Renda, the executive who had started out at Safeway as a teenage bagger in 1974 and climbed the corporate ranks to become one of Burd’s top deputies, and other executives involved in the project were surprised by how much latitude he gave the young woman. He usually held his deputies and the company’s business partners to firm deadlines, but he allowed Elizabeth to miss one after the other. Some of Burd’s colleagues knew he had two sons. They began to wonder if he saw in Elizabeth the daughter he’d never had. Whatever it was, he was in her thrall.