Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. She wanted to remembered as an entrepreneur who changed the world, with a glowing biography of her insight and toughness by someone like Walter Isaacson. But her company was an immense fraud that is still tumbling down around her, SEC fines filed and real charges pending. This is The Soul of a New Machine as done by Joel and Ethan Coen. Arrogant people, machines that fail constantly, and an intricate web of lies and threats that, finally, implodes spectacularly in the face of reality. Short of the Coen Brothers, Carreyrou is the best man for the job, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story that killed Theranos and turned Holmes into a byword for a meteoric fall from grace. Bad Blood is thrilling. I stayed up past 2:00 AM reading it.

Holmes had ambition, I'll give her that. She dropped out of Stanford to chase a dream of a whole new spectrum of blood tests, which would use a few drops of blood milked from a finger to do instant full spectrum lab workup in the comfort of someone's home. No more needles, no more visits to the phlebotomist. Just a sleek, iPhone like-portal to a word of personalized on-demand medical monitoring.

The ambition was grand. There was just one minor problem. The test didn't work, and never did. Microfluidic capillaries jammed, software bugged out, readings swung wildly. As Ludwig Fleck said, "A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking," and whatever Holmes and her investors thought, as long as the various models of analyzers returned inaccurate, Theranos was nothing but a dream.

That didn't stop Elizabeth Holmes. If she had any real talent, it was bending (mostly older, mostly male) investors to her vision. Theranos moved from one round of venture capital funding to another, becoming the highest valued unicorn in Silicon Valley, despite repeated failures of their basic products. The Theranos board included right-wing ghouls like Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and George Schultz, along with General (now Sec. Def.) Mattis, and Darth Vader of the legal profession, David Boies. Holmes also buddied up to Democrats, including Vice President Biden and Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The real action of the book is the insanity inside Theranos. Senior executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, also Holmes' much older boyfriend, must have studied Beria as a leader. Information was tightly controlled to prevent 'leaks'. Skeptics and bearers of bad news were fired. The victims of sudden and summary firings were slapped with massive NDAs and followed by private detectives. Meanwhile, Theranos bodged together a lab out of commercially available equipment, operated in total violation of best practices. The Theranos tests were a far cry from what was advertised, and were wildly inaccurate to boot. The harms were real. One Arizona woman, on receiving a Theranos test with Potassium levels that indicated an immanent stroke, spent Thanksgiving in the ER, paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for totally unnecessary brain scans. The emotional damage is just as real, if harder to quantify. The only thing that limited the negative consequences were the relative small number of roll-out sites in Phoenix.

As a handful of whistleblowers made contact with Carreyrou, and he began investigating. The whole house of cards that was Theranos began to collapse, months after Elizabeth Holmes made her mainstream PR debut and the company's valuation soared to over $9 billion. Reading the failures of management in detail is astounding. Regulatory strategy was to slide between the FDA and the smaller agency that manages lab tests, which is absurd. The basic research was driven by design wish lists: a final box no larger than this, a few drops of blood and no more, rather than an actual research agenda. It must have been terrifying to work for Theranos, realize it was all a fraud, and that you were powerless against Elizabeth Holmes' political and legal connections. Ian Gibbons, a key scientist, committed suicide rather than be deposed as a witness against the company.

In the end, the system worked, sort of. Theranos was shut down, Holmes and Balwani are disgraced and charged with numerous crimes. The company eagerly exploited a gray and under-regulated area to always surf ahead of their promises. They lied and bullied relentlessly. In retrospect, the final crash was never in doubt. But it is astounding that Holmes and Theranos got so far, with little more than intense charisma and a slick sales pitch.

I wonder how many other Silicon Valley unicorns are made of plaster.