Written by John Carreyrou, published in 2020. Summary and review.
Bad Blood is the wild story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her startup health tech company that exploded in value and prestige, only to fall apart from deep corporate fraud.
An absolute wild journey from Stanford drop-out, to billionaire, to criminal. Bad Blood depicts a detailed story through real-life investigative journalism about how Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos, a blood analyzer company that was supposed to change the world.
Her idea is genius, use a pin prick’s worth of blood to run hundreds of tests, panels, labs in the matter of minutes. Can you imagine the applications? Well so did wealthy investors and large corporate partners.
What is truly wild about this story, well perhaps most of it is wild, is how they managed to pass so many steps along the way when folks were leaving left and right once realizing the shadiness that was going on behind the scenes. They say that Elizabeth was a great presenter, which I find odd, because every account of her presence just seems weird – from her low voice to her copycat Steve Jobs syndrome. Extra interesting is that while she managed to get a lot of big investments from high profile folks (I.E. Rupert Murdoch), she did not get any investment from any Private Equity firms that specialize in Healthcare or Health Tech. Essentially anyone with any real knowledge of the industry stayed away from the whole experience and opted to watch the dumpster fire from a safe distance. How this didn’t trickle down to other investors… I have no idea.
Additionally, the stories from ex-employees all seem to be harrowing. People constantly getting fired. Folks eventually finding out how things don’t work, and all the hype is clearly nonsense, mostly didn’t matter. And the way employees were treated was appalling. I would think word of mouth and morale would simply lead to an implosion… though I suppose money talks.
On a personal note, I remember getting the Fortune issue many years back with her face on the cover and the main article being about Theranos. Truly crazy to think that major publications pushed her techno-babble and “most” of the world was tricked by her show (myself included).
This book was highly entertaining from beginning to end. The whole time you sees things unraveling but she continues to build an unstoppable empire, only it’s build on a foundation of glass, lies, fiction.
Like other stories that are still pseudo-ongoing, I wish we had a true ending to this story. I know from the news Elizabeth Holmes faced legal issues but (I believe) dodged most if not all of them essentially because she’s very rich. Politics, personal preference, and/or bias aside, the lack of a true “ending” is the only negative to this story – provided you find silicon valley, business, or corporate deceit entertaining.
TLDR: A great telling of the rise and fall of Theranos, the would-be super company led by Elizabeth Holmes, an imitation-wanna-be Steve Jobs, aimed at revolutionizing the blood analysis world, one drop at a time. Highly Recommend. 4/5 Stars.
