Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Bad Blood author Carreyrou, a multiple-award-winning journalist with two Pulitzer Prizes, was for 20 years a reporter and bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal. His exposé of the Theranos medical fraud and its chief perpetrator, CEO Elizabeth Holmes, helped bring down that corporation. 

Scion of a noted family surrounded by great expectations, Elizabeth Holmes started the company that would become Theranos from her dorm room at Stanford in 2002. Her skills as a founder—decisiveness, optimism, intelligence, piercing blue eyes, and deep voice—attracted several high-powered people to the company’s staff and board of directors. For a time, her promise of a revolution in healthcare, via blood readers that could run dozens of tests on a few drops of blood, seemed unstoppable, and by 2014 Theranos was worth $9 billion. Problems with the company’s machines kept cropping up, however, and employees who brought these issues to Elizabeth tended to get fired. To cover up these issues, Elizabeth became increasingly bold in lying to supporters and the media.

Her misdeeds, and those of her company, finally became known, and federal agencies banned Theranos from the blood-test business. Backers and patients sued, and federal fraud charges were brought against Elizabeth and her aide, Sunny Balwani.