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John Carreyrou is an investigative reporter who works for The New York Times. His claim to fame was when he exposed the fraudulent practices of Theranos, the multi-billion dollar blood testing company. Back then, he worked at The Wall Street Journal where he spent two decades between 1999 and 2019. It was at this time that he published a bunch of articles exposing Theranos and its CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

Carreyrou was born to an American mother while his father is Gerard Carryrou, a French journalist. Given his father’s French citizenship, he spent much of his childhood in Paris. He would then go to Duke University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government and political science in 1994. Following his graduation from college, he got a job with Dow Jones Newswires before he moved to Brussels in Europe, where he worked for the local office of The Wall Street Journal. In 2001, he relocated to Paris where he was tasked with covering French business among other topics. In 2003, he was promoted to the rank of Southern Europe’s bureau chief. During this time, he covered French business and politics in addition to Portugal and Spain. By 2008, he moved back to New York where he was made deputy bureau chief and then health and science bureau chief.

In 2015, John Carreyrou came across some deep research done by Eleftherios Diamandis, the Greek-Canadian biochemist into Theranos. Spurred on by the piece by Diamandis, Carreyrou started investigating Elizabeth Holmes’ blood-testing startup. In a series of articles, he cast doubt on Theranos’ claim of being able to run several blood tests from just one finger prick of blood. While Holmes turned to Rupert Murdoch to kill the story, she was turned down by the man who said he had full trust in the editors of The Wall Street Journal. Carreyrou thus got the nod to all his investigations and posted his findings in the paper. Ultimately, Theranos was exposed as a fraudulent company. John would then publish his findings in the book Bad Blood in 2018. Carreyrou has also been featured in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, a documentary about Theranos that was released in 2019.

In 2019, Jon Carreyrou quit his job at the Wall Street Journal. Even though he loved his job and wanted to continue he had to leave since the paper would not allow him to take paid speaking engagements. In 2021, Carreyrou became the founder of Bad Blood: The Final Chapter in which he discussed the Elizabeth Holmes trial. In 2022, John Carreyrou’s character was featured in The Drop Out a miniseries on Hulu about the Theranos scandal and Elizabeth Holmes. In 2023, John went back to investigative reporting as he joined The New York Times.

Over his long career, John Carreyrou has won many awards. He won an Investigating Reporting Pulitzer Prize alongside several of his colleagues when they wrote several articles that exposed abuse and fraud in Medicare. Earlier on, he was a member of a team that won an Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer when they covered several corporate scandals. For his work in covering the Theranos scandal, he was the winner of the Financial Reporting George Polk Award, the Distinguished Financial and Business Journalism Gerald Loeb Award, and the Investigative Business Journalism Barlett & Steele Silver Award. His novel Bad Blood was a McKinsey and Financial Times Business Book of the Year. The Inventor, the documentary chronicling the Theranos story made its premiere at the Sundance Festival. Carreyrou currently lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn, New York.

John Carreyrou’s work Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup was published in 2018. In this work, he shares the story of the shocking collapse following the unprecedented rise of Theranos, a multi-billion dollar company that promised blood testing technology it never developed. In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes the CEO and founder of Theranos was deemed the female version of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. She promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a blood testing machine that would significantly reduce the cost and ease of blood testing. With the backing of investors such as Tim Draper and Larry Ellison, Theranos sold stock that valued the company at $9 billion with Holmes’ net worth topping out at nearly $5 billion. However, Theranos did not have a working product and it never would have it. With detailed reporting and meticulous research, Carreyrou offers his readers insights into the life and times of the ambitious, secretive, and charismatic Elizabeth Holmes. Her charisma made it possible for her to engineer one of the biggest corporate frauds in American history and exposed the rotten ecosystem of regulators, journalists, and investors that made it possible for Theranos and Holmes to flourish.

One Response to “John Carreyrou”

1. sunny: 4 weeks ago

   I just finished reading this a couple of weeks ago. Surprisingly enjoyable/enlightening.

   Reply