Books on great leaders in history

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies
in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Trust me, after you’re halfway in, you won’t put this book down for dinner. Published in mid, Bad Blood is a compulsively readable account of Theranos Inc., a Silicon Valley unicorn that truly was a fairy tale. Its charismatic young founder persuaded an A-list of wealthy people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on a pipe dream: her spurious claim that a small, portable machine could accurately, speedily diagnose hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood.

At one point Theranos was worth $9 billion, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout with no medical or scientific training, was briefly worth more than $ billion. She was hailed as the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one; in a nod to her hero Jobs, she even wore the same brand of black turtleneck sweaters that Jobs wore, and she got around Palo Alto in a black Audi sedan lacking license plates, only hers came with a chauffeur. Still in her 20s, she had a private Gulfstream jet at her disposal, she never went anywhere without a security detail, and her face was on the cover of national magazines.

Today, in her mids, she is disgraced, broke, and, along with the company's president and chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, under federal indictment for fraud. As leaders, Holmes and Balwani did everything wrong. They lied, they cheated, they intimidated, they manipulated. They were self-aggrandizing, and they were arrogant. They were paranoid, secretive, amoral, insecure, and temperamental. Far from sophisticated, they were naive simpletons who picked a highly regulated industry with life and death implications for their shenanigans. But through shameless audacity and sheer force of her magnetic personality, Holmes persuaded a Who's Who of otherwise sophisticated investors to pour millions into her high-tech fantasy. They included Carlos Slim, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, David Boies, Jim Mattis, Bill Frist, Sam Nunn, Betsy DeVos, Bill Perry, and a number of Fortune chief executives. Barack Obama and Joe Biden sang her praises—the latter after visiting a Theranos laboratory which was nothing more than a Potemkin Village. Walgreens and Safeway signed multimillion-dollar deals.

What they all missed was the sad reality: that her claims were flimsy, unscientific, inconsistent, and outright false. The warning signs were all around, beginning with the simple fact that the board of directors lacked anyone with medical or scientific training or legitimacy. Carreyrou is the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who broke the story, and his reporting is detailed and thorough. Still, I suspect we haven’t yet heard the whole story, which will likely take months if not years of litigation and polemics. For now, we have one helluva good start. I can’t wait for the forthcoming movie, which will star Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes. (Here is a 60 Minutes segment from September on the company and the book.)