Title: Bad Blood
Author: John Carreyrou
Year Published: 2018
Where bought: Amazon I think
Read: Christmas holidays, 2018

I have to admit experiencing a certain schadenfreude when reading this book that I last enjoyed when I read The Smartest Guys in the Room, which told the story of Enron. Here the action has shifted from the boardrooms and steakhouses of Houston, to the juice bars of Silicon Valley, but the hubris and sociopathic behavior remains familiar. There is something troubling yet satisfying in reading about other people’s business failures, especially those as narcissistic, unpleasant and generally removed from reality as the characters in these two stories.

In a nutshell, Theranos (therapy + diagnosis) was founded by the photogenic Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes at age 19. It claimed to revolutionise diagnosis with a blood test machine that required just a pin prick and a much shorter turnaround time. The only problem, it didn’t work, it never worked. Probably in the beginning she genuinely hoped to be progressing towards this technology, but from a very early stage it became clear it didn’t work and the whole business was built on a series of lies and cover-ups and extraordinary workarounds to make up for the fairly substantial deficiency that the technology didn’t work.  This included hiding commercial machines in a room and secretly running tests on these, but often more disturbingly patients were knowingly provided with inaccurate results.

Elizabeth Holmes became a major celebrity, gracing magazine covers and delivering TED talks in her artificially lowered voice – it was a story that people wanted to be true, a female self-made billionaire, and perhaps this blinded many to the reality. It was extraordinary to read of the calibre of people that were fooled, including no less than Henry Kissinger.
Theranos developed a culture of secrecy and even intimidation to protect its secret, eventually tearing apart families and of course resorting to lawsuits and other threats when they were threatened with exposure. The author, John Carreyrou was the Wall St Journal journalist who initially started exposing Theranos’ short-comings in 2015 and this is real investigative journalism at its finest. Holmes stopped at nothing in her attempts to silence the truth, even trying to draw in the Wall St Journal’s owner Rupert Murdoch who had also invested in Theranos.  He let the story run, and the rest is history.

In hindsight, the path to Theranos’ downfall seems so clear, and those who were so close to the action look so blind and foolish for not seeing what they were caught up or taking action sooner. But of course, the perspective of hindsight, laid out sequentially and explained by a journalist of the quality of John Carreyrou, is very different to living through the messy reality.

And that is why none of us can really take too much comfort from the mistakes and downfalls of others, as we don’t really know what we might have been sucked into without realising, or what fate is just around the corner.