The reputations of some of the biggest tech entrepreneurs have taken a well-deserved beating in recent years.  One shocking revelation has followed another and it’s little wonder that governments around the world are looking closely at regulation to curb some of the worst excesses of the larger companies.  The charge sheet is long and growing: selling confidential data, flouting privacy and confidentiality laws, evading tax, enabling election tampering, discriminating against women and ethnic minorities in the workplace, and so on.  Many of those who proclaimed their determination to change the world have ended up looking a lot like the sordid robber barons of the early 20th century: greedy, power hungry, dishonest, and arrogant. Watching the parade of tech CEOs squirming under Congressional questioning, it’s tough to imagine that their public standing could fall any lower or that they could ever recover society’s trust.

It has been a torrid time for many of these leaders and all the pain has been self-inflicted. None of them has yet plummeted as far or as fast as Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, who claimed to have invented a pioneering and radically improved method for testing blood samples.  Once feted on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, a pin-up for female entrepreneurs, and a billionaire in her early 20s, Holmes was exposed last year in a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal.  Her reputation is in tatters and she’s facing criminal fraud charges. What’s most extraordinary about this riveting and quite depressing story about deception and hubris is how long it took for her to be unmasked and how large the coalition of the greedy, stupid, and careless was to allow the fraud to continue for so many years.  Investors, VCs, and business partners, blinded by greed and the lure of vast profits, did very little to verify the claims of a Stanford drop-out with almost no scientific, technological, or commercial credentials.

Bad Blood reads like a thriller and is brilliantly written.  It shows us how vital it is that investigative journalism of the kind conducted by The Wall Street Journal should flourish.  We’re living in a very corrupt age.  Carreyrou’s superb reporting is a reminder that we ought to update our image of villains.  They aren’t always the old guys lurking in the corridors of government.  Keep an eye on the young and ruthless ideologues and evangelists who claim to have nothing but the purest motives while selling us snake oil.