Bad Blood

A riveting exposé that traces the breathtaking rise and collapse of the multibillion-dollar biotech startup Theranos—told by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite legal threats from the company’s charismatic CEO.

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.

Rigorously reported and fearlessly written, Bad Blood is a gripping story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.