The second Theranos trial once again felt like Déjà Vu Tuesday with echoes of when Elizabeth Holmes was on the stand in the first trial.
Holmes and current defendant, Chief Operating Officer Sunny Balwani, were again linked by accusations of investor fraud.
Betsy Devos, the former secretary of education and her family, invested $100 million in Theranos and they said they were duped by Holmes and Balwani.
Holmes, in absentia, took center stage in the trial of her former business partner and boyfriend Balwani Tuesday.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
With investors now on the stand, testifying that both Holmes and Balwani were actively involved in selling Theranos, and the value of its blood testing machines.
"Theranos investors were deceived on a vision level, but more importantly, on an operations level, and this is precisely where Sunny Balwani comes in," said Aaron Solomon, legal analyst for Esquire Digital.
The jury heard the message that Balwani was just as responsible for fraud at the company -- once worth $9 billion -- as Holmes.
Local
She was on the phone with investors while Balwani was in the lab with machines.
"What it's going to show is that they were aligned even though they had different functions within the company,” said Solomon.
Enough, the prosecution hopes, to secure guilty verdicts against Balwani as well.
A representative for the Devos family testified that they were told Theranos was projected to earn almost $1 billion in revenue in 2015.
The company actually ended up losing almost $600 million.
