From the article:
"Using an alias, Tyler Shultz contacted New York state’s public-health lab ..."
"... Mr. Shultz began speaking to a Journal reporter as a confidential source."
"... regulatory complaint Mr. Shultz had filed under the alias Colin Ramirez"
The decision to confront the CEO personally was his own, he could've chosen the anonymous path all along.
It's worth pointing out that Shultz seemed to have acted in good faith initially, and apparently didn't think anonymity was justified:
> Mr. Shultz says he took his concerns directly to Ms. Holmes. When they met in early 2014, she encouraged him to talk to Daniel Young, a Theranos vice president in charge of biostatistics.
He seemed to have acted with optimistic intentions for Theranos. It was only later that he sent a more scathing email, after which he waited for a few days, got the arrogant reply from the Theranos president, and then quit.
Given all of the professional and personal reasons he had to hope the best for Theranos, he had plenty of excuses to just let things go with a it's-above-my-paygrade mentality. Because it was, on paper, above his paygrade, and his boss and coworkers have the prestigious degrees and engineering experience to argue that Tyler is just mistaken.
It's not easy in a cult-like company to call out shit even as/after the shit hits the fan. But it seems rarer to be the frog that jumps out of the warm water, when all the other frogs feel fine and are also threatening to sue the fuck out of you if you do jump.
Schultz Jr was contacted in LinkedIn by a WSJ reporter, he did not hide his identity because he likely (empirically) realized that his anonymous complaint would be ignored.
He didn't have to hide his identity from a WSJ reporter because journalistic sources are protected by similar set of laws. To the readers of WSJ he was just a "confidential source".
Then the article says: "In March 2015, Tyler Shultz was contacted by a Journal reporter through the professional network LinkedIn."
Something doesn't match up here. I can only assume that his anonymous complaint did not reach the desired effect in a year, and he went via other channels, using his own renouned last name.
It would also seem rational for the investigative reporter to ping 20-30 LinkedIn contacts who listed Theranos as their employer in hopes that 2-3 would reply, so maybe he wasn't the only one the reporter contacted.
Was Tyler the only confidential source to talk to the WSJ? Probably not. because of that whole two sources rule good journalists follow.
FYI: "As household staff served them dinner in the formal dining room, the elder Mr. Shultz said Ms. Holmes had told him Theranos’s blood-testing devices worked so well that they were being used in medevac helicopters and hospital operating rooms, Tyler Shultz recalls. He and his colleague knew that wasn’t true."