Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

3.5 stars. Fascinating true story, but the book reads like a very long newspaper account of what happened and it quickly becomes repetitive. Theranos does something shady, an employee tries to intervene, Elizabeth Holmes threatens to sue, and the employee backs down. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum, until suddenly the Wall Street Journal gets involved and Holmes' high-powered attorneys can't intimidate a newspaper quite as successfully.

It's amazing how many rich and famous people believed Holmes' claims without asking for a shred of evidence. I wish Carreyrou had tried a little harder to dig into Holmes' psyche to help the reader understand why she acted the way she did, and whether she really thought she was trying to help people or whether she was just trying to amass wealth even if patients died in the process. In the book's epilogue he muses that she might be a sociopath, but doesn't provide much evidence to support that theory. Surely the truth is more complicated than one simple label.

Makes me want to watch the HBO movie based on it; I'm sure television portrayed this much more dramatically.