Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and I am delighted to be speaking today with John Kerryru.

John is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist with the Wall Street Journal.

And for our purposes today, he is the author of the

excellent book on the Theranos scandal, Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley startup.

The book is fascinating. John tells the slightly horrifying story of Elizabeth Holmes' manipulation

of just about everyone as she perpetrated a massive fraud. Many of us cheered on this 19-year-old

as she seemed ready to transform the way blood diagnostic work was done, building a company

ultimately valued at $9 billion. But the extent of the deception is difficult to understand

without reading John's book based on more than three years of tenacious research. So,

John, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks very much for inviting me.

Why do you start by describing the fraud that's right at the heart of this story?

To understand the fraud, you need to know that the basics of the story, and those are that

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford in her sophomore year when she was 19 years old in 2003 and founded a diagnostic startup that she called Theranos.

The name of the company was a combination of the words therapy and diagnosis.

And the reason was that her original vision was for a little wrist band that would have microneedles that would prick your wrists and draw up tiny quantities of blood and diagnose you with whatever ailed you and inject the appropriate drug to cure you.

Of course, that was more science fiction than reality. So she eventually pivoted to just the diagnostic part of the vision, which was to have a portable

device that could do the full range of lab tests off a tiny pinprick of blood from your finger.

And she worked on that technology and built up this company over the ensuing 10 years.

And by 2014 became a star in Silicon Valley. Her company became valued at $10 billion

for a period of a couple months. It was the most valuable private startup in Silicon Valley,

more valuable than Uber or Airbnb or Spotify. And she had kept half the shares. So she was worth

...