Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at a subsidiary of Enron called Clean Energy Solutions Group. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA. Holmes is partly of Danish ancestry. One of her paternal great-great-great-grandfathers was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant to the United States who founded Fleischmann's Yeast. The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to family friend Joseph Fuisz: "I think the parents very much yearned for the days of yore when the family was one of the richest in America. And I think Elizabeth channeled that, and at a young age."

Holmes graduated from high school at St. John's School in Houston. During high school, she was interested in computer programming and says she started her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. Her parents had arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring, and partway through high school, Holmes began attending Stanford University's summer Mandarin program. In 2002, Holmes attended Stanford, where she studied chemical engineering and worked as a student researcher and laboratory assistant in the School of Engineering. She was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta at Stanford.

After the end of her freshman year, Holmes worked in a laboratory at the Genome Institute of Singapore and tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) through the collection of blood samples with syringes. She filed her first patent application on a wearable drug-delivery patch in 2003. Holmes reported that she was raped at Stanford in 2003. In March 2004, she dropped out of Stanford's School of Engineering and used her tuition money as seed funding for a consumer healthcare technology company.

In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to "democratize healthcare". Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. Holmes pitched the idea to reap "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" to medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, who responded, "I don't think your idea is going to work", explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done. Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing. However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea. In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a combination of the words "therapy" and "diagnosis"). The company's original name, "Real-Time Cures", was changed after deciding that too many people were skeptical of the word "cure". Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.

By December 2004, Holmes had raised $6 million to fund the firm. By the end of 2010, Theranos had more than $92 million in venture capital. In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former secretary of state George Shultz. After a two-hour meeting, he joined the Theranos board of directors. Holmes was recognized for forming "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history" over the next three years.

Holmes operated Theranos in "stealth mode" without press releases or a company website until September 2013, when the company announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centers. She was interviewed for Medscape by its editor-in-chief, Eric Topol, who praised her for "this phenomenal rebooting of laboratory medicine". Media attention increased in 2014, when Holmes appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Inc.

Forbes recognized Holmes as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire and ranked her #110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014. Theranos was valued at $9 billion and had raised more than $400 million in venture capital. By the end of 2014, her name appeared on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents. …

In June 2018, after a two-year-long investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Both pleaded not guilty. The prosecution alleged that Holmes and Balwani had engaged in two criminal schemes: one to defraud investors, and a second to defraud doctors and patients. After the indictment was issued, Holmes resigned as CEO of Theranos but remained chairwoman of its board of directors.

Holmes was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with U.S. district judge Edward Davila presiding. She hired defense lawyers from Williams & Connolly, a prominent American law firm that specializes in white-collar crime defense. The trial began on August 31, 2021, after being delayed for more than a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Holmes's pregnancy. At trial, Holmes testified on her own behalf for seven days, claiming among other things that she was misled by her staff about the technology, and that Balwani held sway over her during the romantic relationship they had and which was still ongoing when the alleged criminal acts happened. The case's evidence outlined Holmes's role in faked demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts, and overstated financials at Theranos.

On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients, and the jury returned a "no verdict" on the three other counts of wire fraud against investors. The judge declared a mistrial on the last three counts, and the prosecution later agreed to dismiss them. Holmes awaited sentencing while remaining free on $500,000 bail, secured with property.

In November 2022, Davila sentenced Holmes to 11+1⁄4 years in federal prison. He also ordered her and Balwani jointly to pay $452 million in restitution to the victims of their fraud. Davila recommended she be incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan, a minimum-security federal prison in Bryan, Texas. Holmes reported to prison on May 30, 2023. …

Holmes partnered with Carlos Slim in June 2015 to improve blood testing in Mexico. In October 2015, she announced #IronSisters to help women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. In 2015, she helped to draft and pass a law in Arizona to let people obtain and pay for lab tests without requiring insurance or healthcare provider approval, while misrepresenting the accuracy and effectiveness of the Theranos device.

Holmes was romantically involved with the Pakistani-born technology entrepreneur Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who immigrated to India and then the US. She met him in 2002 during a trip to Beijing as part of Stanford University's Mandarin program. Holmes was 18 at the time and had just graduated from high school. Balwani is 19 years older than Holmes and he was married to another woman at the time.

Balwani divorced his wife in 2002, and became romantically involved with Holmes in 2003, about the same time Holmes dropped out of university. The couple moved into an apartment together in 2005. Although Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009, when he was given the title of COO, he was advising Holmes behind the scenes from the company's inception. Balwani left Theranos in 2016 in the wake of investigations. The circumstances of his departure are unclear; Holmes has stated that she fired him, but Balwani says that he left of his own accord.

On November 29, 2021, Holmes testified that she had been raped while she was a student at Stanford and that she sought solace from Balwani in the aftermath of the incident. She also said Balwani was very controlling during their romantic relationship, which lasted more than a decade, and at times he berated and sexually abused her. In her testimony, she stated he also wanted to "kill the person" she was and create a "new Elizabeth". However, she also testified that Balwani had not forced her to make the false statements to investors, business partners, journalists and company directors that had been described in the case. In court filings, Balwani has "categorically" denied abuse allegations, calling them "false and inflammatory."

Before the March 2018 settlement, Holmes owned half of Theranos's stock. Forbes listed her as one of U.S. Richest Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.5 billion. In June 2016, Forbes released an updated valuation of $800 million for Theranos, which made Holmes's stake essentially worthless, because other investors owned preferred shares and would have been paid before Holmes, who owned only common stock. Holmes reportedly owed a $25 million debt to Theranos in connection with exercising stock options. …