Where to Start with John Carreyrou: A Reading Guide
Where to start with John Carreyrou — how to approach Bad Blood, his essential investigative account of the Theranos fraud. A complete reading guide.
By Daniel Fry
John Carreyrou is an American investigative journalist at the Wall Street Journal whose 2015–2016 reporting on Theranos — the blood-testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes — is widely considered one of the most consequential pieces of investigative journalism of the decade. His reporting triggered the regulatory investigations that eventually exposed the fraud, led to Holmes’s criminal prosecution (she was convicted of fraud in 2022), and is the primary factual record of the Theranos story. Bad Blood (2018) expands that reporting into a complete narrative account.
Where to Start: Bad Blood (2018)
The essential Carreyrou — and the definitive account of the most spectacular corporate fraud in Silicon Valley’s history. Bad Blood is gripping partly because it is true, but more fundamentally because Carreyrou is a skilled narrative journalist who understands that the story of Theranos is not primarily a technology story or a regulatory failure story but a story about people: Holmes’s extraordinary charisma and her ability to make people believe what they wanted to believe; the board members, investors, and partners who didn’t ask the questions they should have asked; the employees who raised concerns and were threatened into silence; and the whistleblowers who eventually talked.
Elizabeth Holmes is one of the more genuinely mysterious figures in recent American business history. She dropped out of Stanford at nineteen, built a company that at its peak was valued at $9 billion, appeared on the covers of magazines as a pioneering female entrepreneur, and spent a decade telling people — investors, partners, patients — that a technology worked when she knew it didn’t. Carreyrou’s portrait of her is psychologically precise without being either excusing or simply damning: Holmes believed, perhaps genuinely, that if she maintained the performance long enough the technology would eventually catch up to the claims.
The technology never caught up. Theranos was running its vaunted proprietary devices on a handful of tests while using commercially available Siemens machines for the rest — and falsifying the results format to make them appear to come from its own equipment. Patients in Arizona and California were receiving unreliable test results for blood conditions, HIV, and pregnancy. Some made medical decisions on the basis of erroneous data.
The investigation is the book’s most compelling section: the NDAs, the lawyers, the intimidation of sources, Carreyrou tracking down former employees willing to go on record despite genuine legal and financial risk. The eventual collapse — the CMS inspection, the voiding of two years of test results, the criminal indictment — reads as satisfying in the way that good investigative journalism should: evidence, consequence, accountability.
Reading John Carreyrou
Bad Blood is Carreyrou’s essential and most celebrated work. His subsequent Wall Street Journal reporting on Holmes’s criminal trial extends the story. Both standalone.
For the full John Carreyrou bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the John Carreyrou author page on Editors Reads.
Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with John Carreyrou?
Bad Blood (2018) is Carreyrou's essential and most celebrated book — the Wall Street Journal reporter's complete account of how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos defrauded investors and endangered patients with a blood-testing technology that didn't work. The definitive account of Silicon Valley's most spectacular fraud; investigative journalism rendered as thriller narrative without losing documentary precision.
What is Bad Blood about?
Bad Blood tells the complete story of Theranos — the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003 with the promise of performing hundreds of medical tests from a single finger-prick of blood. The company raised nearly $700 million in investor funding, reached a $9 billion valuation, and signed contracts with major pharmacy chains — while running most of its tests on commercially available machines from Siemens and fabricating results. Carreyrou covers the fraud's mechanics, the culture of fear and secrecy, the whistleblowers, and his own investigation.
How did John Carreyrou break the Theranos story?
Carreyrou began investigating Theranos in 2015 after being tipped off by a former employee. He spent months tracking down sources — former employees who had signed NDAs and were threatened with legal action by Theranos's lawyers — and verifying technical claims with independent scientists and laboratory experts. His first article appeared in the Wall Street Journal in October 2015; the subsequent years of reporting, Holmes's denial, and the eventual criminal prosecution are all covered in Bad Blood, which draws directly on this investigation.
What should I read after Bad Blood?
After Bad Blood, Michael Lewis's The Big Short provides a comparable template — financial fraud rendered as compulsive narrative — and covers the 2008 mortgage crisis. William Cohan's Power Failure covers the GE fraud with similar investigative depth. For Silicon Valley culture specifically, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (Facebook's origins) and Sheelah Kolhatkar's Black Edge (hedge fund insider trading) are in the same genre. Carreyrou's subsequent podcast reporting on Holmes's trial is available through WSJ.
