Books Like Bad Blood

Empire of Pain

Patrick Radden Keefe · 2021

The Sackler name is on museum wings and university halls around the world. Keefe traces how that fortune was built on OxyContin, the opioid at the heart of a national addiction crisis, and how the family used every legal and PR tool to avoid accountability for decades. If Bad Blood made you angry about how power protects itself, this will make you angrier.

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The Smartest Guys in the Room

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind · 2003

Before Theranos, there was Enron. McLean and Elkind tell how the energy company collapsed in what was then the biggest bankruptcy in American history, built on accounting fraud so elaborate almost no one inside understood it. McLean was the Fortune journalist who first asked publicly whether Enron was overvalued. Read it to see where Bad Blood comes from.

Billion Dollar Whale

Tom Wright and Bradley Hope · 2018

Jho Low, a young Malaysian socialite, took roughly $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and spent it on superyachts, Hollywood films and celebrity parties. Wright and Hope rebuilt the story from financial records and interviews across a dozen countries. Holmes sold a technology; Low relied on financial complexity nobody checked. Both show what happens when oversight fails.

The Cult of We

Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell · 2021

Adam Neumann took a company that rented desks and persuaded SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to value it at $47 billion, by selling WeWork as a movement rather than real estate. Two Wall Street Journal reporters reconstruct how the delusion held, and how it fell. The charismatic founder, the believing investors and staff, the collapse: almost uncomfortably close to Theranos.

Catch and Kill

Ronan Farrow · 2019

When Farrow started investigating Harvey Weinstein, his own employer tried to kill the story. NBC pulled the plug, his sources were surveilled, lawyers warned him off. He published anyway. Part journalism memoir, part thriller, it’s a companion to Bad Blood: powerful people using money and legal threats to bury the truth, and what it takes to report it anyway.

Going Clear

Lawrence Wright · 2013

Wright spent years investigating Scientology: its origins, its beliefs, and how it controls members and silences critics. He interviewed more than 200 current and former members, and the Church fought the book at every stage. The link to Bad Blood is an organisation that makes secrecy a survival strategy, and how hard it is to report on one from outside.

The Big Short

Michael Lewis · 2010

A handful of traders worked out years before anyone else that the American housing market was built on something rotten. Lewis follows them into the 2008 crisis and explains complex finance more clearly than most textbooks, and somehow it’s funny. Bad Blood shows a failure of scepticism in Silicon Valley; this shows the same failure in finance. Why did nobody ask the obvious question?

Super Pumped

Mike Isaac · 2019

Mike Isaac covered Uber for the New York Times before writing this account of Travis Kalanick’s rise and fall. Kalanick treated laws, competitors and employees as obstacles, and the culture became as much the product as the app. Holmes believed she was saving lives; Kalanick believed he was changing transport. Both used that belief to override every check that might have stopped them.

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova · 2016

Konnikova, a psychologist and journalist, wanted to understand why cons work. Not because victims are stupid, but because they’re human. Drawing on research and dozens of real cases, she answers the question Bad Blood keeps raising: why did so many intelligent people believe Elizabeth Holmes? Read it alongside Carreyrou: he documents the fraud, she explains why it was possible.

American Kingpin

Nick Bilton · 2017

Ross Ulbricht built Silk Road, the dark web marketplace, from his laptop, convinced he was a libertarian pioneer. Bilton reconstructs how he did it, what he became, and how the FBI took it down. No fake technology here, but the same story underneath: a young idealist who believed the rules didn’t apply to him. The most thriller-like book on this list.

Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe · 2018

Not a fraud book at all. Keefe follows the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten taken from her home and murdered by the IRA, and traces the whole arc of the Troubles and the silence after. I include it because Keefe does what Carreyrou does at his best: he makes a huge, complicated history intimate, and reads like a novel without losing accuracy.

The Dropout

Rebecca Jarvis · 2019

Based on the ABC News podcast, The Dropout focuses on Elizabeth Holmes herself: her background, her psychology, and how she built her public persona. Bad Blood is a reporter’s account of the fraud as it unfolded; this asks what was going on inside her head. Read it after Carreyrou, not instead, and the two give you the fullest picture of Theranos.