The Black Turtleneck

She was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C., the daughter of an Enron executive and a Congressional staffer, and grew up in Houston and the Washington suburb of Great Falls, Virginia. She dropped out of Stanford in October 2003 at nineteen and founded Theranos that month with $1 million of family money. She claimed her company had developed a fingerstick blood-testing device that could perform 240 medical tests on a single drop of blood. The technology did not exist. By her thirtieth birthday Theranos was valued at $9 billion and she was the youngest self-made female billionaire in America. The Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published the first investigative piece on October 16, 2015. The company collapsed. She was convicted on January 3, 2022, on four counts of federal wire fraud. She is currently serving an 11¼-year sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas.

Sterling Aldridge's biography traces the arc with the documentary rigour the case made famous. The book covers the Houston childhood, the Stanford freshman year and the Channing Robertson lab where Holmes drafted her first patent application at nineteen, the long Sunny Balwani relationship and the COO years, the Walgreens Boots Alliance partnership, the Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and James Mattis advisory-board recruitment, the Phyllis Gardner Stanford whistleblower complaint, the Wall Street Journal investigation, the SEC settlement of March 2018, the federal indictment of June 2018, the August 2021 to January 2022 trial in the Northern District of California, and the May 30, 2023 Bryan, Texas reporting date.

What emerges is a portrait of the Stanford dropout whose blood-testing pitch the Silicon Valley venture-capital establishment elected to fund and the federal government has, eventually, found criminal.