Recommendations
Books Like Bad Blood
Best books to read after Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
Bad Blood is the definitive account of the Theranos fraud — a decade of deception built on fabricated technology and Silicon Valley hubris, exposed through patient Wall Street Journal reporting. These 8 books extend into corporate fraud, the pathologies of startup culture, investigative journalism, and the psychology of charismatic deception.
- 1Buy
The Dropout
by ABC News
The podcast series based on ABC News reporting that parallels Carreyrou's investigation — covering the same story from a multimedia journalism perspective and providing additional context through audio interviews.
- 2Buy
Billion Dollar Loser
by Reeves Wiedeman
Wiedeman's account of the WeWork rise and fall — Adam Neumann's decade-long construction of a massively overvalued real estate company on charisma and vision — the closest parallel to the Theranos story in ambition, deception, and spectacular collapse.
- 3Buy
The Big Short
by Michael Lewis
Lewis's account of the mortgage crisis — another story of massive institutional fraud enabled by complexity, perverse incentives, and the human tendency to believe what we want to believe — told with the same character-driven narrative drive as Bad Blood.
- 4Buy
Super Pumped
by Mike Isaac
The account of Travis Kalanick and Uber's rise and fall — another Silicon Valley story of a charismatic founder whose 'win at any cost' culture produced a company that succeeded massively and then collapsed under the weight of its own ethical failures.
- 5Buy
The Smartest Guys in the Room
by Bethany McLean
The definitive account of the Enron fraud — the most consequential corporate fraud of the early 21st century, which prefigures Theranos in its combination of charismatic leadership, analytical obfuscation, and the collective willingness of smart people to not ask hard questions.
- 6Buy
Lying for Money
by Dan Davies
Former bank regulator Dan Davies's account of the mechanics of financial fraud — how confidence games, accounting fraud, and Ponzi schemes actually work — providing the structural analysis that helps readers understand why the Theranos deception was effective for so long.
- 7Buy
Say Nothing
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe's account of a murder case at the heart of the Troubles in Northern Ireland — demonstrating the same patient, deep-source investigative journalism methodology that Carreyrou used, on a different subject with equally high stakes.
- 8Buy
The Con Men
by Miles Kington
A panoramic account of confidence games throughout history — showing how the same psychological mechanisms that made Theranos possible have enabled fraudsters throughout human history.
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