Bad Blood

Prologue

November 17, 2006


Tim Kemp had good news for his team.

The former IBM executive was in charge of bioinformatics at Theranos, a startup with a cutting-edge blood-testing system. The company had just completed its first big live demonstration for a pharmaceutical company. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos s twenty-two-year-old founder, had flown to Switzerland and shown off the system s capabilities to executives at Novartis, the European drug giant.

Elizabeth called me this morning, Kemp wrote in an email to his fifteen-person team. She expressed her thanks and said that, it was perfect! She specifically asked me to thank you and let you all know her appreciation. She additionally mentioned that Novartis was so impressed that they have asked for a proposal and have expressed interest in a financial arrangement for a project. We did what we came to do!

This was a pivotal moment for Theranos. The three-year-old startup had progressed from an ambitious idea Holmes had dreamed up in her Stanford dorm room to an actual product a huge multinational corporation was interested in using.

Word of the demo s success made its way upstairs to the second floor, where senior executives offices were located.

One of those executives was Henry Mosley, Theranos s chief financial officer. Mosley had joined Theranos eight months earlier, in March 2006. A rumpled dresser with piercing green eyes and a laid-back personality, he was a veteran of Silicon Valley s technology scene. After growing up in the Washington, D.C. area and getting his MBA at the University of Utah, he d come out to California in the late 1970s and never left. His first job was at chipmaker Intel, one of the Valley s pioneers. He d later gone on to run the finance departments of four different tech companies, taking two of them public. Theranos was far from his first rodeo.

What had drawn Mosley to Theranos was the talent and experience gathered around Elizabeth. She might be

John Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for twenty years. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in the category of beat reporting, and the Barlett & Steele Silver Award for Investigative Business Journalism. Bad Blood was named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three children.

A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book The Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Fortune, Marie Claire, GQ, Mental Floss, Science Friday, Bloomberg, Popular Mechanics, BookRiot, The Seattle Times, The Oregonian, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal

A great and at times almost unbelievable story. . . . Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron. New York

Chilling. . . . Reads like a thriller. . . . Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection. The New York Times Book Review

Gripping. . . .  Riveting. . . .  [Told] with a momentum worthy of a crime novel. Los Angeles Review of Books

Riveting. . . . For all its boomtime feel, there are timeless aspects to Theranos story. Venality is age-old, but so is courage, and that of the ex-employees who blew the whistle on its deceptions is restorative. . . . And more than an honorable mention should go to Carreyrou, a dogged old-school reporter uncowed by Theranos legal hardball. San Francisco Chronicle

Engrossing. . . . Hard to put down. . . . Boasts movie-scene detail. . . . Theranos employees are the story s heroes, with the force of journalism not far behind. Science

A veritable page-turning. . . . Gripping. . . . Presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes... Unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare. Nature

This is a stay up all night to read book that is just as propulsive, shocking, and riveting as the best thriller novels. Bustle

I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family