Robert Greene gives his sixth law a blunt title:
Court Attention at All Cost.
Some eighteen centuries earlier, a young man was dividing his days between books and the fields at Longzhong, in central China. The uncle who had brought him to the region was dead. Zhuge Liang held no office.
He compared himself to Guan Zhong and Yue Yi—men remembered for shaping states and winning wars centuries before he was born.
Most people were unconvinced.
His friends Xu Shu and Cui Zhouping believed him. He also visited Pang Degong, a respected local scholar, who gave him another name:
The Sleeping Dragon.
Another scholar, Huang Chengyan, heard that Zhuge Liang was looking for a wife. He came with a proposal. His daughter was not beautiful, he said, but she had the intelligence to match him.
Zhuge Liang agreed to the marriage.
The scholar Sima Hui spoke of the Sleeping Dragon to Liu Bei, a commander trying to restore the failing Han dynasty. Xu Shu entered Liu Bei’s service. One day, he brought up his friend.
“Would you care to meet Zhuge Liang, the Sleeping Dragon?”
“Bring him with you.”
Xu Shu would not.
“You can go to him. You cannot summon him here.”
Liu Bei went to Longzhong.
He went three times before they met.
By then, Liu Bei was in his forties. He had spent years fighting, retreating and accepting shelter from other men. He still had soldiers. What he lacked was a secure place of his own.
He had not given up, he told Zhuge Liang.
What should he do?
Zhuge Liang began with Cao Cao, whose armies dominated the north. Liu Bei could not challenge him head-on. Sun Quan, whose family held the lands southeast of the Yangtze, should be an ally, not a target.
Then he turned to two provinces: Jing, along the middle Yangtze, and Yi, farther west. There Liu Bei could establish himself. Keep Sun Quan as an ally. Put his own territories in order. When an opening came, advance north along two routes.
The conversation became known as the Longzhong Plan.
“Good,” Liu Bei said.
Before long, Cao Cao’s army came south.
Defeated at Changban, Liu Bei withdrew to Xiakou, near the Yangtze. Zhuge Liang asked permission to seek help from Sun Quan.
He crossed the river.
On the other side, Sun Quan’s advisers were still arguing over whether to fight or surrender. Zhuge Liang made his case. Zhou Yu, one of Sun Quan’s leading commanders, urged resistance.
The two sides joined forces.
At Red Cliffs, the officer Huang Gai prepared boats loaded with dry grass and oil. Cao Cao’s men, expecting him to surrender, watched them approach.
Then the boats caught fire.
The vessels in Cao Cao’s fleet lay close together. Flames passed from one to another. Zhou Yu’s forces attacked, and Liu Bei’s men joined the pursuit.
Cao Cao withdrew north.
The words spoken at Longzhong had reached the Yangtze.
Years passed. Liu Bei took territory in the west and became emperor of Shu. Dying at Baidicheng, he entrusted his son and the kingdom to Zhuge Liang.
The son, Liu Shan, inherited the throne. Zhuge Liang, already chancellor, was made a marquis, authorised to maintain his own administration, and given the governorship of Yi Province.
All affairs of state, great and small, were decided by him.
In his younger days at Longzhong, he had been a tall man who would sit with his arms around his knees and let out a long, ringing call. When friends asked how high he expected to rise, he would smile and say nothing.
By 234, he was at Wuzhang Plain, leading another campaign against the northern kingdom of Wei.
For more than a hundred days, the armies had faced each other. Zhuge Liang kept seeking a battle. The opposing commander, Sima Yi, stayed behind his defences.
When a messenger from the Shu camp arrived, Sima Yi did not ask how many soldiers Zhuge Liang had, or where he intended to move next.
His questions concerned the chancellor.
How did he sleep? How much did he eat? How much work did he do?
The messenger said Zhuge Liang rose early and worked late. Even minor disciplinary matters came before him.
He ate very little.
“So little food, so much work,” Sima Yi said. “How long can he last?”
The messenger returned to the Shu camp and repeated the words.
Zhuge Liang sighed.
“He understands me well.”
His chief clerk, Yang Yong, tried to persuade him to leave some things to others. Even a household needed its work divided: someone to farm, someone to cook. If the master did everything himself, how could he bear it?
Zhuge Liang wept.
“I know. But the late emperor entrusted his son to me. I am afraid the others will not give it the care I do.”
That autumn, he died at Wuzhang Plain.
He was fifty-four.
But once a person has been seen, and has even gained power, what happens next?
Laozi’s Tao Te Ching offers these words:
Know what is enough, and avoid disgrace.
Know when to stop, and avoid danger.
In this way, you can endure.
·
Nearly eighteen hundred years later, in California, a nineteen-year-old student was starting a company.
Elizabeth Holmes was in her second year at Stanford. The venture she began in 2003 would become Theranos. The following year, she left university to work on it full-time.
She wanted to change blood testing.
No more tubes filled from a vein in the arm. A few drops from a fingertip, she promised, would be enough for a wide range of tests. Faster, and cheaper.
At TEDMED in San Francisco in 2014, Holmes wore a black suit over a cotton turtleneck. Her blonde hair was loosely pinned up. She paced as she spoke, hands joined at her waist, barely blinking. Her voice was low.
She spoke of a future in which people would no longer dread a blood test.
A reporter who spent four days at Theranos saw her in the same black clothes each day. In her office hung Jobs’s Apple profile, printed on his resignation day.
Her board included former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, alongside retired four-star Marine general James Mattis.
Holmes was thirty. Kissinger was ninety-one.
“She looks like nineteen,” he said.
Investors had valued Theranos at about nine billion dollars. Forbes calculated the value of her stake.
Four and a half billion dollars.
Looking back at Holmes then, I think of the young man at Longzhong, his arms around his knees, letting his voice carry.
On 15 October 2015, The Wall Street Journal published John Carreyrou’s investigation.
The attention shifted from the stage to the laboratory.
There were machines to examine, test results to check. The reporting found that most of the company’s tests were being carried out on conventional equipment made by other companies. Her earlier claims were being set beside what the technology could actually do.
In 2014, Forbes had put her fortune at four and a half billion dollars.
In 2016, it recalculated.
Zero.
Later came the criminal trial.
In January 2022, a federal jury found Holmes guilty on charges of defrauding investors. That November, the judge sentenced her to prison.
135 months.
By then, the whole world had seen her.
Notes
1 | Greene and Laozi
Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, Penguin Books, 2000, ISBN 9780140280197. Law 6: “Court Attention at All Cost.”
The passage from the Tao Te Ching is from chapter 44; its English wording is a rendering of the Chinese rather than a quotation from a published English translation.
2 | Zhuge Liang’s early life
The principal source is Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms, volume 35, with Pei Songzhi’s annotations. The account of Zhuge Liang sitting with his knees clasped and calling out comes from the Weilue, preserved in those annotations. The stories concerning Pang Degong and Huang Chengyan appear in the Records of Xiangyang. “Sleeping Dragon” is a rendering of Wolong, an epithet suggesting exceptional ability not yet brought into public service.
3 | Longzhong and Red Cliffs
The strategic discussion at Longzhong and the mission to Sun Quan are recorded in Zhuge Liang’s biography. The allied campaign and Huang Gai’s fire attack are described in the biographies collected in volume 54 of Records of the Three Kingdoms. The river victory was a joint military effort, not a battle personally commanded by Zhuge Liang.
4 | Wuzhang Plain
The exchanges involving the returning messenger and Yang Yong follow chapter 103 of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the historical novel traditionally attributed to Luo Guanzhong. They are literary dialogue, not a contemporary transcript. Zhuge Liang’s recorded age follows traditional Chinese reckoning. The surviving accounts do not establish a precise medical cause of death.
5 | Holmes’s public image and valuation
Contemporary profiles: Ken Auletta, “Blood, Simpler,” The New Yorker, 15 December 2014 issue; Roger Parloff, “This CEO Is Out for Blood,” Fortune, 12 June 2014. Board membership is also documented in Fortune’s “A Singular Board at Theranos,” 12 June 2014.
The Forbes figures were estimates based on privately held shares, not cash in Holmes’s possession. Its downward revision also reflected the priority of outside investors’ preferred shares over her common stock. See Matthew Herper, “From $4.5 Billion to Nothing: Forbes Revises Estimated Net Worth of Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes,” Forbes, 1 June 2016.
6 | The investigation and verdict
John Carreyrou, “Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology,” The Wall Street Journal, 15 October 2015. The investigation examined the gap between the company’s public claims and its laboratory practices.
The convictions comprised one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against investors and three substantive investor-related wire-fraud counts. Holmes was acquitted on the patient-related counts decided by the jury; three other investor counts produced no unanimous verdict. The sentence described above is the one imposed in November 2022. Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California, “Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty of Investor Fraud,” 4 January 2022, and “Elizabeth Holmes Sentenced to More Than 11 Years for Defrauding Theranos Investors of Hundreds of Millions,” 18 November 2022.
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