Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

"Chilling...Reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men." --The New York Times Book Review

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

“Carreyrou blends lucid descriptions of Theranos’s technology and its failures with a vivid portrait of its toxic culture and its supporters’ delusional boosterism. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong.” Publishers Weekly (Starred)

“[A] chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon valley… Prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells [this story] virtually to perfection… [His] description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist… His recounting of his efforts to track down sources—many of whom were being intimidated by Theranos’s bullying lawyer, David Boies—reads like a West Coast version of ‘All the President’s Men.'” Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times Book Review

“You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.” Bethany McLean, bestselling coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here

John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Inc., Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism and the Barlett & Steele Award for Investigative Journalism in 2016. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.