Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Starts Her Prison Sentence Soon

Not many people have had a fall from grace as monumental as Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of the now-defunct healthcare company, Theranos. Once heralded by Forbes as the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire and Time’s Most Influential People in the World, Holmes will soon be leaving her husband and two kids behind to carry out a nearly 12 year prison sentence (plus three years of supervised release).

What did Elizabeth Holmes do?

In November 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 135 weeks in prison after a jury found her guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Keep reading to learn all about why Theranos failed, what the future looks like for Holmes, and where she is now.

By all accounts, Holmes seemed to have a bright future. She started her first business selling computer source code to Chinese universities while she was still in high school.

After high school, Holmes studied chemical engineering at Stanford University. She got a job at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where she tested blood samples for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) and even applied for her own patent.

In 2004, Holmes dropped out of college and founded Theranos with her tuition money. She was just 19 years old.

In a 2015 interview with WIRED, Holmes said she started the company to “make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most.” She boasted that her company could run numerous blood tests with a single micro-sample of blood and get results in less than four hours.

Although her former professors at Stanford were skeptical, Holmes was able to garner the support and financial backing of investors. She raised over $92 million in venture capital by 2010. Investors included former Secretary of State George Shultz, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and Betsy DeVos.

Theranos’s success started to unravel in 2015 when Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou wrote an article exposing alleged fraudulent practices by the company. The article claimed that Theranos was giving inaccurate test results and using machines from other manufacturers instead of its Edison device for results.

Although Holmes denied the claims, the problems for her and her company snowballed. Several lawsuits followed, including one by the SEC charging her and Theranos’ former president Ramesh Balwani with defrauding investors out of $700 million.

One year after Forbes named Holmes as the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire in 2015 with a net worth of $4.5 billion, it stripped her of the title and put her net worth at zero. Holmes had to forfeit all of her shares in Theranos and the company eventually dissolved.

Jury selection in the trial against Holmes started around Aug. 31, 2021. It was previously rescheduled due to her pregnancy and the COVID-19 pandemic. Holmes's sentencing date was then pushed to Nov. 18, 2022, and she was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison.

In July 2021, Holmes gave birth to a baby boy. She and her husband Billy Evans, heir of the Evans Hotel Group, live in San Francisco. Shortly after, she then became pregnant with her second child.

Holmes was convicted of three felony counts of wire fraud and one felony count of conspiracy to commit fraud. Her attorneys requested she serves 18 months on the grounds that she is no longer a threat to the public and doesn't have any prior convictions. Prosecutors requested 15 years. After things didn't pan out as expected, Holmes filed an appeal.

While awaiting a decision on her appeal, Holmes requested that she remain free on bail so that she may tend to her two small children. On April 10, 2023, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila found that because there wasn't enough evidence to support her request, she will be required to surrender herself on April 27, 2023, CNBC reported.

Currently, Holmes is out on bail while she awaits the day to turn herself in. As for Balwani, he is expected to report to a Southern California prison on April 20 to begin his prison term.