Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug. I read this book while advising a fund on an activist takeover of Ziopharm Oncology (now TCRT) as a university student. My role was the science; I had no visibility into what was happening at the board level. Reading Blood and Money gave me the other camera angle on what I had been inside, and what I had been too junior to see. The book follows the development of Imbruvica and Calquence, two BTK inhibitors that transformed the treatment of mantle cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The compound that would become Imbruvica was initially deemed worthless and sold off at a rock-bottom price as part of a larger deal. It took Robert Duggan, a former cookie salesman, scientologist, and serial entrepreneur whose son had died of brain cancer, to become an activist investor in Pharmacyclics and force the company’s hand. What followed was a race between two startups that ended in AbbVie paying $21 billion for Pharmacyclics and AstraZeneca acquiring a majority stake in Acerta Pharma, in deals Vardi calls some of the greatest Wall Street trades ever made in any industry. Vardi documents a shift in how biotech gets funded. For the first time, stock traders were directly financing private biotech companies. Wayne Rothbaum had no scientific background yet inserted himself into daily operations, enforced stealth mode, monitored patient data, and eventually secured a byline on a New England Journal of Medicine paper. Vardi is a reporter and the book reads like a very long magazine feature: vivid drama, thin analysis. The scenes are good, an oncology society dinner in Chicago that devolved into arm-twisting, a BTK inhibitor startup run out of a California garage, Hamdy departing Pharmacyclics to co-found Acerta and race his former employer to market. But the book rarely steps back to ask what any of this means. The connection to my own experience is the most clarifying thing about reading it. Blood and Money is worth reading as a case study of that playbook in full, even if it stops short of a thesis.