Bad Blood

Some business books age into period pieces. Bad Blood keeps getting more relevant. John Carreyrou's account of the rise of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that reached a $9 billion valuation on technology that never worked, has become the modern template for how charisma, secrecy plus investor FOMO can inflate a company built on almost nothing.

What it's about

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 with a seductive pitch: a machine that could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger prick of blood. Over the next decade she assembled a board stacked with famous names, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, landed a retail partnership with Walgreens; all while the devices in the lab quietly failed. Carreyrou reconstructs how the company kept the illusion alive through compartmentalized teams, aggressive lawyers plus a culture of fear enforced by Holmes's partner Sunny Balwani.

The second half shifts into a reporting thriller. Carreyrou, then at the Wall Street Journal, chronicles his own investigation: whistleblowers like Tyler Shultz risking their careers, surveillance, legal threats from David Boies's firm, the pressure campaign that tried to kill the story before it ran in 2015. The book ends with Theranos collapsing under regulatory scrutiny, before Holmes ever faced a jury.

Why everyone's talking about it

Bad Blood won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year in 2018. It has since spawned an entire genre: the Hulu series The Dropout, podcasts, endless "next Theranos" comparisons applied to every overhyped startup. Holmes's 2022 fraud conviction, followed by her prison sentence, sent readers back to the book that laid out the whole scheme years earlier. In an era of AI hype cycles, its lessons about "fake it till you make it" culture feel newly urgent rather than settled history.

The verdict, for now

This is investigative journalism operating at the highest level; meticulously sourced, propulsive, damning without ever feeling gleeful. The limitations are real, though. The cast runs to dozens of executives, lab techs plus lawyers, so readers can lose track of who is who across the years. Because it was published in 2018, the story stops before the trial, the conviction, the sentencing; anyone wanting the full arc must look elsewhere for the ending. Holmes herself also remains something of a cipher, since she never spoke to Carreyrou. None of that dims the achievement. If you read one book about startup fraud, this is still the one.