'Bad Blood' Back at No. 1 After Nathan Fielder's Holmes Documentary

Eight years after publication, John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood" ranks No. 1 in three Amazon bestseller categories. The 2018 Theranos exposé tops the charts for biomedical engineering, business infrastructure and venture capital, as of Monday. Among all books on the retailer's site, it sits at No. 3,048.

The sales surge follows the theatrical release of "You Can See Everything," the new documentary on Elizabeth Holmes directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. The A24 release opened nationwide on Oct. 16 and earned $15 million domestically over its first weekend. That figure makes it one of the year's strongest documentary debuts by a wide margin.

Why is an eight-year-old book climbing the charts again?

The answer is simple: a hit film attached to the same story. "You Can See Everything," nearly three hours long and filmed largely in secret, follows Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and their two children during the final weeks before Holmes reported to federal prison in May 2023. The documentary's theatrical success has driven viewers back to the book that first told the full story.

"Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" remains, by Variety's account, the definitive record of Theranos' rise and collapse. Carreyrou, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, first exposed serious problems with the company's technology in 2015. His reporting showed the machine never worked as advertised.

The book traces how Holmes convinced some of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors that she had built a revolutionary blood-testing device. The pitch: one machine capable of running hundreds of tests from just a few drops of blood. Theranos reached a $9 billion valuation on that promise. By the time the company dissolved in 2018, the valuation had evaporated entirely — a collapse that turned one of tech's most celebrated startups into one of its biggest scandals.

What is the book's track record?

"Bad Blood" was a commercial force long before the documentary. It hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list after its 2018 release. It then spent more than 100 weeks — roughly two full years — across the newspaper's bestseller lists, according to Variety.

Carreyrou has endorsed the new film himself. He praised the documentary publicly and suggested that Fielder and Oppenheim's approach deserves Oscar recognition. That endorsement carries weight: his 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation broke the story the film and book both build on.

Where does Elizabeth Holmes stand now?

Holmes was convicted in 2022 on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy related to Theranos. The court sentenced her to more than 11 years in federal prison. She has continued to maintain her innocence, Variety reports, and that position becomes a recurring point of tension in "You Can See Everything."

The film's access is unusual. It captures Holmes, Evans and their two children in the weeks before she began her sentence in May 2023, footage shot largely without public knowledge during production. For a figure who once controlled her image as tightly as any Silicon Valley founder, the intimacy of the material has fueled much of the documentary's attention — and, by extension, the book's return to the charts.

What does the pattern tell us?

The numbers sketch a familiar cycle: film opens, film earns, book sells. A $15 million opening weekend for a documentary is rare; a nearly three-hour documentary debut at that scale is rarer still. The effect on an eight-year-old title has been immediate and measurable — three category No. 1 positions on Amazon within roughly a week of release. If awards-season attention follows, as Carreyrou's own Oscar prediction suggests it might, the paperback's chart run could extend well beyond the film's theatrical window.