Comment by sytelus

The book Bad Blood is amazing and extremely gripping. The question, however, why Holmes did this is still open. The critical point to remember is that Holmes never sold her shares and in fact she kept accumulating more. She didn't need IQ of 150 to figure out that going live with erroneous medical devices would get her slammed with lawsuits from patients. If she just wanted to dup investors to become rich, she could have done it real easy by stepping aside, let someone inherit the mess and then selling her stack. In fact her board asked her to do just that before WSJ found out and she refused it. I have seen her plenty of talks/interviews and its super hard to believe she was working with malicious plan all along. Part of me wants to feel that her desire was genuine to some extent and she just hoped things would work out if she pulled lies and deception long enough to keep raising funds. She had lots of top tier advisors who have done exactly that to establish their own companies. I'm not defending her by any measure, she was classic bad manager with Balwani topping even her. There was a very little chance she could have actually ran talented team longer term - but this is precisely the part book conveniently leaves out.