Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
5:00 p.m.
Purdue Memorial Union - North Ballroom
Free and open to the public
On October 19 Daniels School of Business will welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter John Carreyrou for the Purdue Series on Corporate Citizenship and Ethics.
In his New York Times bestselling book Bad Blood, John Carreyrou shares the full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of the one-time multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley company that rose to fame with the promise of blood-testing technology that never existed. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.
With meticulously researched and detailed reporting, Carreyrou provides insight into Theranos’s intensely charismatic, secretive, and ambitious founder, and the very real harm that resulted from her false claims. In his lectures, Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, and exposes the ecosystem of investors, journalists, and regulators that allowed it to flourish.
Carreyrou has won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with several colleagues for a series of articles exposing fraud and abuse in Medicare. Earlier in his career, he was also part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for its coverage of corporate scandals. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in the category of beat reporting, and the Barlett & Steele Silver Award for Investigative Business Journalism. Bad Blood was also named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The HBO documentary based on the Theranos story, The Inventor, was directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney and premiered at Sundance. A graduate of Duke University, Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three children.