Empires to Ashes

Elizabeth Holmes promised to revolutionize healthcare with a single drop of blood. Instead, she built a $9 billion fraud on fake demos, intimidation and Silicon Valley's desperation to find the next Steve Jobs. The story of how one woman's obsession endangered thousands of patients and fooled the world's smartest investors.

Once China’s largest property developer, Evergrande rode a wave of credit-fueled expansion until its $300 billion debt mountain collapsed. The company’s downfall exposed deep flaws in China’s real estate boom and left a £200m mansion in London crumbling.

Hollywood legends Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.7 billion to revolutionize mobile entertainment with 10-minute episodes. Six months later, Quibi was dead. A masterclass in how to misread the market, ignore user feedback and burn through nearly $2 billion with nothing to show for it.

Doug Evans convinced Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins to invest $120 million in a WiFi-connected juice press that squeezed proprietary packets. Then Bloomberg discovered you could squeeze the packets by hand. The ultimate symbol of Silicon Valley's obsession with solving problems that don't exist.

Yahoo could have bought Google for $1 million, Facebook for $1 billion and was offered $44.6 billion by Microsoft. It rejected them all. The story of a internet pioneer that made every wrong decision possible, from missing search to mobile to social media, until it sold itself for scrap to Verizon.

Before Facebook conquered the world, MySpace ruled social media with 100 million users. Customizable profiles, music discovery and teenage angst made it unstoppable. Then News Corporation bought it, filled it with ads, ignored innovation and watched Mark Zuckerberg eat its lunch.

Travis Kalanick built Uber into a $70 billion company by breaking laws, crushing competitors and creating a toxic culture. Sexual harassment scandals, stolen trade secrets and a video of him berating a driver finally brought him down. The price of 'moving fast and breaking things' when those things include people.

Wirecard was Germany's tech success story, a payments processor worth €24 billion that displaced Commerzbank in the DAX index. Then the Financial Times discovered that €1.9 billion of its cash didn't exist. A tale of fake revenues, intimidation of journalists and how German regulators protected a fraud while prosecuting its critics.