The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from their charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.
In 2014, 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 blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.
For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at the Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. 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 SEC charged Holmes with perpetrating “an elaborate, years-long fraud.”
Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
Fascinating, horrifying, and richly detailed account of corporate ambition gone awry. I started this book and could not put it down. It’s a horrifying true story of a driven entrepreneur whose only overriding goal was to become insanely rich. And she would do anything, any unimagineable thing, to get there.Elizabeth Holmes leveraged her family’s high profile connections to draw in early investors and supporters, who were not very inquisitive on details, nor very skeptical in nature. Drawing on the good name and reputation of these early supporters, she was able to…
The Impossible Revealed Very interesting read about the fraud that is Elizabeth Holmes. For those of us in the clinical lab industry, we knew that all the tests she claimed could be performed accurately and less expensive from a capillary sample was just simply not true. It was just a matter of time for the truth about her and the impossibility of what she claimed, to finally be revealed. Great investigative reporting John Carryrou!
Impossibly too good to be true This is an impeccably researched and referenced account of the Theranos saga. As a long-time observer and sometime competitor of Theranos I watched this tale unfold whilst working at a couple of established IVD companies. Everyone I knew who had ever developed an assay or instrument knew this was smoke and mirrors, impossibly too good to be true. What I never suspected was just how personally dishonest EH had been, and for how long the complex deception was maintained. Whilst I’ve met a few…