Are you still reeling from the jaw-dropping revelations and high-stakes drama of John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood”? If tales of corporate scandal, ethical dilemmas, and riveting investigative journalism captivate you, then you’re welcome! In this post, we explore a collection of books that are cut from the same cloth as “Bad Blood”.
Each of these carefully selected reads offers a deep dive into some of our time’s most startling and thought-provoking scandals. From gripping exposés to in-depth analyses of corporate fraud and deception, these books promise to keep you glued to the page. Get ready to journey through the intriguing and murky world of business scandals, where truth can be stranger than fiction!
7 Books Like Bad Blood (Business/Finance Crime)
Bad Blood is a must-read book for new investors who want to start trading in the stock market. As a true crime story, it helps us make decisions, take action, and be honest. I learned a lot about leadership and the importance of corporate culture. I also learned how not to lead, treat others, and stay out of jail.
Books like “Bad Blood” offer more than just a story; they provide a window into aspects of the real world that are often complex, hidden, and hugely influential. They are both eye-opening and thought-provoking, offering a blend of education, entertainment, and enlightenment.
I will discuss seven white-collar crime books similar to Bad Blood. They encourage critical thinking about how businesses operate, the role of leadership, and the importance of ethical practices in the professional world. So, let’s get on the list.
| Name | Key Focus | Tropes |
|---|---|---|
| The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean | A non-fiction book detailing the rise and fall of Enron, exposing the corruption and scandal behind its collapse. | Corporate scandal, financial investigation, real-life crime, business ethics, insider accounts, corporate greed, journalistic inquiry, economic analysis, whistleblower stories, detailed case study. |
| Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart | A non-fiction account of the major players involved in the Wall Street insider trading scandals of the 1980s, focusing on corruption and criminal activity in the financial sector. | Financial crime, insider trading, 1980s Wall Street, investigative journalism, corruption, legal battles, ethical dilemmas, complex financial schemes, real-life characters, regulatory oversight. |
| Billion Dollar Whale by Bradley Hope | A non-fiction book that chronicles the story of Jho Low, a financier accused of orchestrating a multi-billion dollar fraud involving the Malaysian investment fund, 1MDB. | Financial scandal, real-life crime, investigative journalism, international intrigue, corruption, high-profile personalities, economic fraud, money laundering, political connections, elaborate schemes. |
| Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman | The rise and fall of Adam Neumann and his company WeWork, highlighting the excesses, missteps, and hubris in the world of tech startups and venture capitalism. | Tech startup culture, corporate biography, entrepreneurial ambition, business failure, investigative reporting, leadership flaws, financial excess, venture capital dynamics, real-life cautionary tale, corporate drama. |
| American Kingpin by Nick Bilton | A true-crime narrative about the creation and downfall of the Silk Road, an online black market, and its founder Ross Ulbricht, detailing the complex web of law enforcement efforts to bring him down. | Cybercrime, dark web exploration, law enforcement investigation, entrepreneurial crime, real-life thriller, digital anonymity, ethical dilemmas, criminal mastermind, high-tech pursuit, moral complexities. |
| Red Notice by Bill Browder | A journey from being a successful financier to a human rights activist, focusing on his confrontations with the Russian government after exposing corruption, leading to the tragic death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. | Financial world, human rights activism, Russian politics, corruption exposure, personal transformation, legal battles, government retaliation, memoir, global justice campaign, political intrigue. |
| Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar | A non-fiction account of the government’s pursuit of billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen and his firm, SAC Capital, for insider trading, highlighting the complex and often murky world of hedge funds and Wall Street. | Financial crime, insider trading investigation, hedge fund industry, legal drama, journalistic inquiry, ethical gray areas, high-stakes trading, regulatory challenges, personal ambition, market manipulation. |
1. The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
This book tells the story of Enron, one of the biggest corporate scandals ever. It’s a long and detailed book, and that’s because the Enron fraud was pretty complex. So, this book dives into all areas of fraud in Bad Blood. Enron was a massive company. There is one of the darlings of Wall Street. They’re making billions of dollars annually and are on top of the business world. But much of the revenue they claimed to have made didn’t exist. It existed on paper only!
So, they use many accounting tricks, schemes, and straight-up lies to report to the public that they are making billions of dollars when they are not. They had to make all these different companies and do all these complex financial things to hide this.
So, the book dives into it. Since Enron’s fall, regulators have cracked down on what Enron did. They have many more reporting requirements and things they must do to ensure that a company doesn’t defraud the public as Enron did.
Author: Bethany McLean
Average Rating: 4.6/5
Category: Economic History, Corporate Law, Collar Crime Mystery
Number Of Pages: 480
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
2. Den of Thieves
This is the oldest book on the list, dealing with insider trading in the 1980s. If you think of Gordon Gekko and Wall Street, it was the era of big deals, mergers, and acquisitions. A company would purchase another company. What happened to this group of people? They realized that a company’s stock price usually rocketed when it said it would buy another company.
So, they bought that company’s stock before announcing that a company would purchase another. It was announced that they would get taken over, and suddenly, those people could make more money. This is very illegal. It’s called insider trading, and there were many of them, and it was taken down. Like Bad Blood, the scandal took down quite a few people, and this book explores it.
Author: James B. Stewart
Average Rating: 4.6/5
Category: Business Ethics, True Crime Biography
Number Of Pages: 592
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
3. Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
This book is about a man named Jho Low, who was a Malaysian businessman. He defrauds the Malaysian government’s fund of 4.5 billion dollars. It’s one of the biggest frauds of all time. He did it by himself and was also a crazy, massive partier. He threw some of the wildest parties in Las Vegas. Jho invested $100 million in that production. He was often seen partying with Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a crazy story of someone who had access to an insane amount of funds and went crazy with it.
The exciting thing here is he had a lot of that money. He had nearly a billion dollars in cash in his bank accounts. When you hear about very wealthy people, about billionaires, a lot of their wealth is tied to their investments, assets, and stocks. So, they don’t have bank cash reflecting their net worth. But Joe Lowe had a billion dollars in cash. You can relate the mastermind game to Bad Blood.
Author: Bradley Hope
Average Rating: 4.5/5
Category: Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions Crime, Finance & Politics
Number Of Pages: 400
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Mass Market Paperback
4. Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
This is the story of Adam Neumann and his company (WeWork). It was one of the most overvalued companies of all time. It was once valued at almost 50 billion dollars and then crumbled away. Once investors learned about Adam Neumann, the crazy, eccentric CEO who was not a good business leader. They weren’t that great of a business, with almost no way to profitability.
Adam Neumann and his company were never convicted or proven guilty of any crimes, but this book fits the mold of these other books. The title billion-dollar loser is being applied to him. It talks about how he convinced investors to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into WeWork, even though the business plan didn’t make sense. It talks about the corporate culture like Bad Blood. We read about all-night parties and getaways, drug use, nepotism, and not the smartest business decisions of all the leaders I’ve read.
Author: Reeves Wiedeman
Average Rating: 4.4/5
Category: Biographies of Business Leaders, Workplace Culture, Crime & Law
Number Of Pages: 352
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
5. American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
This book is about a person who built a billion-dollar drug empire inside his bedroom. The significant part is everything written in this book is a thrill. It is a true story, and I’m not supporting any acts that have been done in this book. I’m only sharing my thoughts and opinions on how great the book is written and how remarkable the story is.
It primarily revolves around the deep web. I highly suggest you search the deep web for those who don’t know it. It is a more secure online place where they use bitcoins, which can be used as money on the deep web. The storytelling is unique and exciting. There are two books, but they are both fantastic for storytelling. I highly recommend you pick one up after Bad Blood.
Author: Nick Bilton
Average Rating: 4.7/5
Category: Crime & Criminal Biographies, Organized Crime True Accounts
Number Of Pages: 328
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
6. Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
Bill Browder is President Putin’s name at the infamous Helsinki press conference. It is the book you need to read if you want to know. This book gives a detailed account of when Browder first got to Russia. He was the largest investment businessman in the country at the time. The Russian government ends up framing him in a tax fraud scheme. So he hires a lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
Bill starts digging around and unearths massive government corruption in Russia. They arrest him, torture him for about a year, and kill him. The Russian officials do. Bill Browder escaped the country in time, but he has made it his mission to get justice for his lawyer.
So, he came back to Washington and advocated for the Magnitsky Act. The U.S. government signed the Magnitsky Act into law, which sanctions these Russian officials hard. So, it’s affecting Putin’s money. In retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, Putin banned all Americans from adopting Russian babies.
This book is super fun to read, but it’s true. It also provides some much-needed background if you’re trying to make sense of the Russia investigation, which is a huge project. If you’re trying to follow that, this book will help.
Author: Bill Browder
Average Rating: 4.7/5
Category: Historical Russia Biographies, Politics & Finance
Number Of Pages: 380
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
7. Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
This book is about Wall Street and, specifically, the hedge fund industry, which got started. It tells the story of Stephen Cohen, who started one of the largest hedge funds and pioneered the industry. The hedge fund was called SAC. Sac Capital and Black Edge stand for what that means in financial.
Hedge funds make money by making minor changes in the stock market. So any information they can get about what a company stock will go. This book delves into a particular case that has to do with the pharmaceutical biotechnology industry.
The government started getting suspicious that insider trading was happening because it’s illegal for people who work in industries traded on the stock market to share confidential information that may affect the stock price. So Black Edge is inside its lingo for inside information, and the hedge fund SAC Capital made that into fine art.
Suppose you could say that gathering inside information and funneling that to make billions of dollars. The book offers a revelatory look at the grey zone where so much of Wall Street functions. It’s a riveting true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the government’s pursuit of Cohen and his employees and raises urgent and troubling questions about power and wealth. The characters and plans relate to Bad Blood; you will get the same flavor and lessons.
Author: Sheelah Kolhatkar
Average Rating: 4.5/5
Category: Crime & Criminal Biographies, Investing & Trading
Number Of Pages: 295
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Spiral-bound
Each book we’ve shared offers a unique window into the corporate world’s complex and sometimes dark aspects, blending meticulous research with captivating storytelling. These tales of ambition, deception, and the pursuit of truth are more than just stories; they’re powerful reminders of the impact of ethics and integrity in the business world.
So, grab one of these enthralling reads, settle into your favorite reading spot, and prepare to be taken on an unforgettable journey into the heart of some of our era’s most dramatic corporate tales. Happy reading!
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