Bad Blood : Secret and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou | Paperback | March 2023 

Now with a new afterword covering the months-long landmark trials of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani.

‘I couldn’t put down this thriller . . . the perfect book to read by the fire this winter.’ Bill Gates

Winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2018

The riveting true story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, 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.

In Bad Blood, John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

‘Chilling . . . Reads like a West Coast version of All the President’s Men.’ New York Times Book Review

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Author Info

John Carreyrou is a member of the Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting team. He joined the Journal in 1999 and has been based in Brussels, Paris, and New York for the paper. John has covered a number of topics during his career, ranging from Islamist terrorism when he was on assignment in Europe to the pharmaceutical industry and the US healthcare system. His reporting on corruption in the field of spine surgery led to long prison terms for a California hospital owner and a Michigan neurosurgeon. His reporting on Theranos was recognized with a George Polk Award.

Born in New York and raised in Paris, he currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.