The Ultimate Silicon Valley Scam

By now we are all familiar with crimes and criminals on Wall Street. Bernie Madoff, Enron, Ivan Boesky, Barry Minkow and many others that have become household names. On the West Coast, the startup world of Silicon Valley had been somewhat spared from this taint. The world of “insanely great products,” “do no evil,” and “bringing friends together,” has, at least until recently, kept it’s patina.

Yet in a world where people want to see the future and want to be a part of it, it certainly was a fertile ground for fraud. And no one perpetrated a greater fraud than Elizabeth Holes and her company Theranos.

The story of a company whose mission was to tell you everything about your blood, with a simple finger prick, seemed too good to be true. And like most thing that seem too good to be true, it was.

John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal.  He has, from the beginning, been the leader in telling the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. His book, soon to be a major motion picture, is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

My conversation with John Carreyrou: