Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
View on GoodreadsWall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou's 2018 investigation of Theranos — Elizabeth Holmes's blood-testing startup that raised over $700 million on a technology that didn't work — built on years of his Pulitzer-track reporting that broke the story.
Core ideas
- The technology was never close to working — the central blood-testing claim was structurally impossible at the scales Holmes promised, and the company knew this and ran a parallel-fraud operation (using commercial third-party machines while claiming it was its own technology).
- The board (Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, George Shultz, Sam Nunn) is treated as part of the fraud's enabling structure — names that bought credibility for due diligence those board members weren't doing or weren't capable of doing.
- The whistleblowers (Tyler Shultz, Erika Cheung) and the personal cost they paid are the book's emotional core — Theranos's legal-and-private-investigation campaign against them is what investigative journalism's targets routinely do, and the book documents the playbook.
Published2018
Pages339
ISBN9781524731656
ReadMar 2026
