Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud in connection to her blood-testing company, Theranos.

The company's valuation soared after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick.

Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal.

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.

Elizabeth Holmes is partly of Danish ancestry.

One of her paternal great-great-great-grandfathers was Charles Louis Fleischmann, a Hungarian immigrant who founded Fleischmann's Yeast Company.

The Holmes family "was very proud of its yeast empire" history, according to a 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.

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 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.

When Holmes pitched the idea to reap "vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger" to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner 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 portmanteau of "therapy" and "diagnosis").

Robertson became the company's first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.

Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and deliberately copied his style, frequently dressing in a black turtleneck sweater, as Jobs did.

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.

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.

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.

In 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company.

In the following year, as revelations of fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".

The decline of Theranos began in 2015, when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company's claims and whether Holmes had misled investors and the government.

In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Theranos, Holmes, and former Theranos chief operating officer (COO) Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani with raising $700 million from investors through a "massive fraud" involving false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of the company's blood-testing technology; Holmes settled the charges by paying a $500,000 fine, returning 18.9 million shares to the company, relinquishing her voting control of Theranos, and accepting a ten-year ban from serving as an officer or director of a public company.

In June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Balwani on fraud charges.

Her trial in the case of U.S. v. Holmes, et al. ended in January 2022 when Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors, and acquitted of defrauding patients.

She was sentenced to serve years in prison, beginning on May 30, 2023.

She and Balwani were fined $452 million to be paid to the victims of the fraud.

The credibility of Theranos was attributed in part to Holmes's personal connections and ability to recruit the support of influential people, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis, and Betsy DeVos, all of whom had served or would go on to serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials.

Holmes was in a clandestine romantic relationship with Balwani during most of Theranos's history.

Following the collapse of Theranos, she started dating hotel heir Billy Evans, with whom she has two children.

Theranos and Holmes's career are the subject of a book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018), by The Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou; an HBO documentary film, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019); a true crime podcast, The Dropout; and a Hulu miniseries based on the podcast, The Dropout (2022).

Holmes is incarcerated at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan.