Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It takes a mighty strong person and an incredible investigative journalist to take down a multibillion company lead by a CEO and her partner who are doing nothing but telling lies, mistreating their employees, taking millions of dollars under false pretenses from Fortune 500 businesses and wealthy investors, betraying their esteemed board members, and worst and most harmful of all, putting the lives of their end customers in serious jeopardy because the technology that they claim to have engineered does not exist nor has it been FDA approved or tested. This is John Carreyrou’s BAD BLOOD: SECRETS AND LIES IN A SILICON VALLEY STARTUP. Carreyrou went to monumental lengths over the course of several years, with the help of named and unnamed sources who worked or were connected to Theranos, the company, which claimed to have created a blood-testing device that with ‘one drop of blood’ could obtain hundreds of test results thus saving lives. Not only were their little machines ineffective but they were doing no such thing. Meaning, they could not provide accurate test results because they were not even obtaining them. Rather, they were using commercial analyzers in their place. At the helm was Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford drop-out who had a brilliant idea, but it was never brought to fruition. She simply leads people to believe it was with her charm. A lot of people. It is staggering how many people she swayed. We’re not just talking about a co-worker or two but former heads of state, who later joined her board, people who amassed fortunes in the billions who were willing to loan Theranos money, major corporations including Walgreens and Safeway who wanted to get in on the ground floor, and many more. It is equally astonishing how so many smart, successful people were not taken aback by her freakish obsession with imitating Steve Jobs. Perhaps, they chalked this up to her eccentricity. It took courage for people to come forward. They were threatened with lawsuits that could bankrupt them ten times over, by one of the leading and most intimidating litigators in the country. Carreyrou, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, who has been with The Wall Street Journal for almost 10 years, had the support of his editor, newspaper, and its attorneys. He never thought for a minute to back down. The result – a series of articles in the paper that exposed Theranos and Holmes for the fraud they committed. It is dumbfounding to read BAD BLOOD and to think that Holmes and her number two in command, Sunny Balwani, also her romantic partner, which was kept secret, got away with so much for so long, and even when finally confronted and their hands were forced, they still would not admit fault. Is Holmes a criminal? Is she delusional? What I do know is that you will not be able to put this book down.