Elizabeth Holmes

Theranos

Founding 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. 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. 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. During 2015, Holmes established agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Capital Blue Cross, and AmeriHealth Caritas to use Theranos technology.

In October 2015, despite Boies's legal threats and strong-arm tactics, the Journal published Carreyrou's "bombshell article" detailing how the Edison device gave inaccurate results, and revealing that the company had been using commercially available machines manufactured by other companies for most of its testing. Carreyrou continued to report problems with the company and Holmes's conduct in a series of articles and, in 2018, published a book titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, detailing his investigation of Theranos.

Holmes denied all the claims, calling the Journal a "tabloid" and promising the company would publish data on the accuracy of its tests. She appeared on CNBC's Mad Money the same evening the article was published. Jim Cramer said, "The article was pretty brutal", to which Holmes responded, "This is what happens when you work to change things, first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world."

In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a warning letter to Theranos after an inspection of its Newark, California, laboratory uncovered irregularities with staff proficiency, procedures, and equipment. CMS regulators proposed a two-year ban on Holmes from owning or operating a certified clinical laboratory after the company had not fixed problems in its California lab in March 2016. On The Today Show, Holmes said she was "devastated we did not catch and fix these issues faster" and said the lab would be rebuilt with help from a new scientific and medical advisory board.

In July 2016, CMS banned Holmes from owning, operating, or directing a blood-testing service for a period of two years. Theranos appealed that decision to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services appeals board. Shortly thereafter, Walgreens ended its relationship with Theranos and closed its in-store blood collection centers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also ordered the company to cease use of its Capillary Tube Nanotainer device, one of its core inventions.

In 2017, the State of Arizona filed suit against Theranos, alleging that the company had sold 1.5 million blood tests to Arizonans while concealing or misrepresenting important facts about those tests. In April 2017, the company settled the lawsuit by agreeing to refund the cost of the tests to consumers, and to pay $225,000 in civil fines and attorney fees, for a total of $4.65 million. Other reported ongoing actions include an unspecified investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and two class action fraud lawsuits. Holmes denied any wrongdoing.

In March 2018, the SEC charged Holmes and Theranos's former president, Ramesh Balwani, with fraud by taking more than $700 million from investors while advertising a false product. The charges of fraud included the company's false claim that its technology was being used by the U.S. Department of Defense in combat situations. The company also lied when it claimed to have a $100-million revenue stream in 2014. That year, the company only made $100,000. On March 14, 2018, Holmes settled the lawsuit. The terms of Holmes's settlement included surrendering voting control of Theranos, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, a ban on holding an officer or director position in a public company for 10 years, and a $500,000 fine.

At its height in 2015, Theranos had more than 800 employees. It dismissed 340 people in October 2016 and an additional 155 in January 2017. In April 2018, Theranos filed a WARN Act notice with the State of California, announcing its plans to permanently lay off 105 employees, leaving it with fewer than two dozen employees. Most of the remaining employees were laid off in August 2018. On September 5, 2018, the company announced that it had begun the process of formally dissolving, with its remaining cash and assets to be distributed to its creditors.

U.S. v. Holmes, et al.

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. 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. Holmes awaited sentencing while remaining free on $500,000 bail, secured with property.

In November 2022, Davila sentenced Holmes to 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. The Federal Bureau of Prisons projected that Holmes would be released from prison in 2032, approximately two years early, in accordance with the Bureau's guidelines for good conduct time.

Holmes appealed her conviction and sentence to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her lawyers argued that Davila had committed serious legal errors by, among other things, allowing the prosecution to introduce certain government reports and expert witness analysis, by restricting their cross-examination of former Theranos laboratory director Adam Rosendorff, and by excluding some of Balwani's testimony. U.S. circuit judges Jacqueline Nguyen, Ryan D. Nelson, and Mary M. Schroeder heard oral arguments regarding her appeal in June 2024. In February 2025, the Ninth Circuit judges rejected Holmes' legal arguments and affirmed her conviction and sentence.

In December 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported that Holmes had begun campaigning for a presidential pardon from President Donald Trump.

In March 2026, Judge Davila reduced Holmes sentence by 12 months after considering revised federal sentencing guidelines that argued for a more lenient sentence given her lack of prior convictions and the failure of the prosecution to prove that any Theranos investors had suffered personal hardship as a result of the loss of their investment in the failed venture.

Promotional activities 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.

Connections Theranos's board and investors included many influential figures. Holmes's first major investor was Tim Draper – Silicon Valley venture capitalist and father of Holmes's childhood friend Jesse Draper – who "cut Holmes a check" for $1 million upon hearing her initial pitch for the firm that would become Theranos. Theranos's pool of major investors expanded to include Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state; William Perry, a former secretary of defense; James Mattis, a future secretary of defense; Gary Roughead, a retired U.S. Navy admiral; Bill Frist, a former U.S. senator (R-TN); Sam Nunn, a former U.S. senator (D-GA); and former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel of Bechtel.

Recognition and public image Before the collapse of Theranos, Holmes received widespread acclaim. In 2015, she was appointed a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows and was named one of Time magazine's "Time 100 most influential people". Holmes received the Under 30 Doers Award from Forbes and was ranked number 73 in its 2015 list of "the world's most powerful women". She was also named Woman of the Year by Glamour and received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Pepperdine University.

Holmes was awarded the 2015 Horatio Alger Award of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, making her its youngest recipient in history. She previously had been named Fortunes Businessperson of the Year and had been listed in its 40 Under 40 feature. In 2015, she was a member of Bloombergs 50 Most Influential. In the same year actor Jared Leto presented her with a Glamour Award and then-US President Barack Obama named her as Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. In 2016, Fortune named Holmes in its article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders". Holmes said her mother dressed her in black turtlenecks when she was young and that she had worn the turtlenecks beginning around the age of eight, but she also claims that she started wearing black turtlenecks upon founding the company in 2003. An employee said she suggested Holmes copy Jobs's famous Issey Miyake turtleneck look in 2007.

During most of her public appearances, she spoke in a deep baritone voice, although a former Theranos colleague later claimed he heard her speak in a voice stereotypical of a woman her age to welcome him when he was hired. Gardner of Stanford also denies that Holmes has a naturally deep voice. Her family, however, has maintained that her deep voice is authentic. In a 2023 New York Times interview, Holmes spoke in her natural, higher pitch voice, and confirmed that the low voice was an affectation.

Personal life

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. 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. 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 first met William "Billy" Evans in early 2017. In October 2022, weeks before her sentencing hearing, it was reported she was pregnant with a second child. Holmes was accused of conceiving a second child, according to a court filing from February 2023, as a strategy for delaying the start of her prison term. Holmes denied this, saying she wanted to grow her family and the child was conceived before she was indicted, which she did not anticipate. Prior to her incarceration, she lived in the Mortimer Fleishhacker House in Woodside, California, with her partner.

In January 2022, NPR obtained a copy of a partial police report from the evening of October 5, 2003, in which Holmes called the police and alleged she had been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house at Stanford between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. that morning. The police report supported claims made by Holmes during the trial, in which she said: "I was questioning how I was going to be able to process that [rape] experience and what I wanted to do with my life, and I decided that I was going to build a life by building [a company]." She had started Theranos later that year. The report, written by the deputies who responded to the call, was withheld from release, and the partial information obtained by NPR does not identify an alleged perpetrator or other details about the incident but identifies the street address of the Sigma Chi fraternity house as the location.

In the media

The case of Holmes is said to have created a stigma for other female entrepreneurs, particularly in the sciences and health care industries, who are often compared to her. Writing in The New York Times, technology journalist Erin Griffith commented that "Holmes continues to loom large across the start-up world because of the audacity of her story, which has permeated popular culture", with female entrepreneurs reporting that "the frequent comparisons [to Holmes] are pernicious". Holmes has also been featured in a number of media works:

In June 2016, Deadline Hollywood first reported that Jennifer Lawrence would play Holmes, in a film directed by Adam McKay, adapted from John Carreyrou's then-unpublished book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. In December 2021, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the film would be produced and distributed by Apple Studios, with Legendary Pictures co-producing. In November 2022, Jennifer Lawrence called off the film after seeing Amanda Seyfried's Emmy Award-winning portrayal in The Dropout, saying she did not see the point, "I was like, 'Yeah, we don't need to redo that.' She did it." In May 2018, author John Carreyrou released the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, describing the life of Holmes and the inner workings of Theranos. The film rights to Carreyrou's book were purchased by Legendary nearly two years before the book was published. In January 2019, ABC News, Nightline, and Rebecca Jarvis released a podcast and documentary about the Holmes story called The Dropout. It included interviews and deposition tapes of key figures, including Holmes, Balwani, Christian Holmes (Elizabeth's brother), Tyler Shultz (Theranos whistleblower and grandson of Board Member George Shultz), Theranos board members Bill Frist, Gary Roughead, Robert Kovacevichz and others. The series also featured an interview with Jeff Coopersmith, the attorney representing Balwani. In June 2021, on season 7 episode 12 of the US comedy-drama Younger, a musical number is featured about famous scammers, in which Elizabeth Stanley portrays Holmes. On August 8, 2021, the Australian newsmagazine 60 Minutes featured the Theranos story and Holmes's upcoming trial. In March 2022, Hulu released The Dropout, a miniseries based on the podcast of the same name. The series starred Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, a role for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. In May 2023, Holmes gave her first interview in seven years to The New York Times. The interview was published while she was preparing to go to prison.