Bad blood

In 2015, 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 fund-raising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: the technology didn't work.

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors and retail partners such as Safeway and Walgreens, hiding the fact that her technology was flawed and had serious limitations. Meanwhile, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, fostered a mercurial and highly secretive workplace environment in which Theranos employees routinely saw their colleagues fired for raising red flags. Their deception would lead to nearly one million false test results, some of which seriously jeopardized the health of patients.

When John Carreyrou, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, got a tip and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits, as were many of Carreyrou's sources. 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 gripping story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.