Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup

In 2015, 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 medical blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Oracle's 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 $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: the technology didn't work.

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors and retail partners. The deception would lead to nearly one million false test results, some of which seriously jeopardized the health of patients.

When John Carreyrou, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits, as were many of Carreyrou's sources. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero, and in March 2018, the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with perpetrating 'an elaborate, years-long fraud'.