And in the company, those who raise concerns are fired while sycophants are promoted - all of which sets up Theranos for its eventual downfall. Lies and secrecy are used to compensate for the unfulfilled promise of the technology itself.

The book paints a compelling image of a girl driven by stories of her family’s past greatness and current state of embarrassment, leveraging both powerful family and personal connections to support her grandiose vision. It’s so tantalizingly full of lies and terrible decisions and secrets that it hooks you in for the same reasons you can’t help slowing down just a little when driving past the scene of an accident. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.”īad Blood was one of the quickest reads I’ve had in a while. I think Bill Gates’s description (which sold me on this book) sums it up nicely: “The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. He first reported in October 2015 that Theranos was secretly using traditional blood testing machines to test blood instead of their own technology. The book’s author, John Carreyrou, is the Wall Street Journal journalist who first started reporting on possible malfeasance at Theranos. Both Elizabeth and the company’s COO are currently facing serious jail time for wire fraud. In also covers the war Theranos waged as the walls slowly started closing in on their fraud. While a number of articles have profiled the big issues - they were lying, duh - Bad Blood does a deep dive into the company’s culture and the thousand small decisions that preceded Theranos’ downfall. It’s a saga that ensnared a range of tech, legal, political and other industry leaders such as Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and our current Secretary of Defense John Mattis. Over the course of a decade, it ballooned to a valuation of almost $10 billion, but within a few short years was defunct once it became clear their technology was not what they claimed. It claimed to offer faster, cheaper blood tests from just a pinprick of blood ( see their demonstration on YouTube), as opposed to traditional methods which require needles, lab equipment and technicians. For the Detailed Chapter-By-Chapter Summary, click here or scroll all the way down.īad Blood covers the fall of Theranos, a startup that was founded by Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes when she was nineteen.

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