John Carreyrou

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & Author, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

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In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs—a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup 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 fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

Enter John Carreyrou, an intrepid reporter with The Wall Street Journal. No stranger to the type of story Theranos would eventually become, Carreyrou had previously covered both corporate scandal and health care-related fraud. With Theranos, however, the stakes became even higher when Holmes threatened legal action against him, hoping to forestall the collapse of her once-ascendant Silicon Valley juggernaut.

Just three weeks after Carreyrou published Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Elizabeth Holmes was indicted by the Justice Department on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Now, Carreyrou is presenting audiences with the full, riveting inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, after he broke the story and pursued it to the end despite intense pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

About John Carreyrou

John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. 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. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.