Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes (born February 3, 1984, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American entrepreneur who was the founder and CEO (2003–18) of the blood-testing company Theranos Inc. In 2014—at age 30—she was dubbed the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, but, less than a year later, it was her own blood that authorities were after, as the nature of her corporate malfeasance became clear.
Simply put, Holmes made grand claims she knew not to be true about her company’s blood-testing technology. In 2018 Holmes was forced to relinquish control of Theranos, and four years later she was convicted of defrauding investors. Despite never having admitted her guilt, in 2023 she began an 11-year sentence at the Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas.
Early life and education
Holmes, the daughter of a U.S. government aid worker and a congressional committee staffer, grew up in Washington, D.C., and Houston. An awkward but imaginative child, she had few close friends and spent much of her time alone, reading, designing inventions, and dreaming of changing the world. In high school Holmes participated in a Mandarin immersion trip to Beijing facilitated by Stanford University. While there, she befriended technology entrepreneur Ramesh (“Sunny”) Balwani.
In 2002 she enrolled at Stanford to pursue a degree in electrical and chemical engineering. The university named her a “President’s Scholar,” awarding her a stipend to create her own research project. As a freshman Holmes persuaded distinguished chemical engineering professor Channing Robertson to hire her in his lab as the only undergraduate working among Ph.D. students.
During a summer break from her studies at Stanford, Holmes took a job at the Genome Institute of Singapore to work on a computer chip designed to detect the presence of the SARS virus in the body. She then became interested in developing more-efficient medical devices that could surpass traditional diagnostic testing and therapeutic assessment. Upon her return to Stanford, Holmes patented a device that attached to a person’s body and measured the effectiveness of a given medication by comparing parameters of chemical markers produced by a diseased region with those of the therapeutic agent.
The rise of Theranos
Holmes reported being sexually assaulted during her time in college and has said that that experience, in part, led her to drop out and dedicate herself to entrepreneurship. She left Stanford during her sophomore year to launch Theranos, a company devoted to developing minimally invasive laboratory testing services. She founded the company in 2003 and later became CEO. Balwani, 19 years her senior, served as an informal adviser, and the two became romantically involved.
Theranos produced its first offering in 2014, a laboratory testing process that claimed to run more than 1,000 medical tests on a sample of only a few drops of blood. It was a technology that would revolutionize medical data collection—if it worked.
Theranos’s promotional materials, created by marketing professionals including Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris, internationally renowned photographer Martin Schoeller, and the high-profile advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, whose clients include Apple and McDonald’s, maintained that the company was improving laboratory blood collection and testing by miniaturizing and automating the process. Traditional blood testing relies on drawing 5–10 ml (0.17–0.34 fluid ounce) of blood through a large needle to fill one tube for each test requested by a physician. That process is often painful for patients and costly for insurance carriers, and experts worried that the procedure dissuaded patients who were young, elderly, or anxious about needles from getting blood work done in a timely manner. As laboratory data is one of the key tools physicians use to help patients make informed decisions about care, a less painful, less expensive blood-testing method could ease the diagnostic process and thus ensure that more patients receive necessary care.
Between 2003 and 2014 Holmes grew Theranos by securing funding from investors, building infrastructure, and developing the company’s proprietary processes in secret. In meetings she lowered the pitch of her voice and wore shoulder pads to come across as more authoritative. She wore black turtlenecks in photographs and adopted several health-related quirks, including drinking green juice. Holmes promoted not just the image of her company but also her own image as an ambitious and confident college-dropout entrepreneur, leveraging Steve Jobs’s cultural capital to align herself with his innovative success. Like Jobs, she instituted intensive measures of secrecy and security regarding most aspects of production. In 2009 her then-partner Balwani formally joined the company as president and chief operating officer, despite his lack of a scientific background. Four years later Walgreens, which owned more than 8,000 drugstores in the U.S., announced that it had partnered with Theranos to establish wellness centers inside its pharmacies. By 2014 Theranos offered diagnostic tests for more than 200 conditions, was licensed to operate in almost all U.S. states, and held a certification from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal regulator overseeing medical laboratories. In 2014 Forbes magazine named Holmes one of the richest women in America, valuing her personal wealth at $4.5 billion and her company at $9 billion.
The idea of making blood testing easier, less painful, and cheaper was so appealing that few questioned if Theranos’s proposed solution was too good to be true. Holmes, with her youthful ingenuity and domineering leadership style, was the darling of Silicon Valley, the hyper-professional “it girl,” and the eye of a hurricane of self-perpetuating hype. Once one billionaire trusted her, others fell in line.
Problems begin
In 2015 low-level Theranos employees Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz, grandson of former U.S. secretary of state and major Theranos investor George P. Shultz, noticed that other employees were tampering with statistical data and test results from Theranos’s main proprietary technology, the allegedly revolutionary Edison machine. The two became major whistleblowers, sharing their concerns with the Wall Street Journal. Shortly after, WSJ journalist John Carreyrou published an article detailing the company’s technological shortcomings. He reported that the Edison was being used for only a fraction of the company’s tests and produced unreliable results, despite Holmes’s repeated claims to the contrary. Carreyrou also revealed that Theranos scientist Ian Gibbons had committed suicide in 2013 after struggling with the pressures of working for Holmes, adding a tragic note to growing suspicion surrounding the company.Other questions concerning the company and its secretive processes soon surfaced, which ranged from Theranos’s decision to release aggregate testing data (which could obscure statistical shortcomings more effectively than primary testing data) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to compliance problems with the company’s Newark, California, laboratory. Theranos was also under scrutiny for substantial delays in giving federal authorities full access to its medical devices and in subjecting its devices and technologies to scientific peer review.
In July 2016 CMS notified Theranos that the company had failed to provide adequate documentation showing that it had corrected its previous errors and was complying with federal regulations, and thus CMS blocked Theranos from receiving reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid and forbade Holmes from possessing or operating a medical laboratory for two years. In March 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Holmes and Balwani with fraud for allegedly taking more than $700 million from investors while advertising a false product. Holmes settled the charges with the SEC by agreeing to pay a fine of $500,000, surrendering almost 19 million shares in Theranos (valued at more than $4 billion at Theranos’s height) to relinquish her controlling interest in the company, and consenting to a ban on serving as either an officer or a director of a public company for a period of 10 years. In exchange both Holmes and Theranos were able to avoid confirming the SEC’s allegations against them. In June 2018, however, she and Balwani were indicted by federal authorities on wire fraud charges. That same day Holmes stepped down as CEO, and later that year Theranos ceased operations.
Trial, punishment, and greater fame
Beginning in August 2021 Holmes was tried in a federal court on 11 counts of fraud, and in January 2022 she was convicted on four counts of defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury found her not guilty on four counts of defrauding patients, and it failed to reach a verdict on the remaining counts. Later in 2022 Balwani went to trial, and he was also found guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In November 2022 Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Forbes revised her net worth to $0.
Holmes’s story has received no shortage of media attention. In 2018 Carreyrou released an investigative nonfiction book chronicling Theranos’s secrets. Following Carreyrou’s breakthrough reporting, Holmes has been the subject of an HBO documentary, an ABC podcast, and a Hulu limited series.
In addition to catastrophic losses for private investors (Theranos was never a publicly traded company), Holmes’s start-up caused medical harm to patients who relied on their inaccurate blood tests. Many believe that her failures as a CEO have contributed to a stigma and distrust of female entrepreneurs, especially in scientific fields. The fallout of her dishonest practices forms a cautionary tale about foolhardy entrepreneurship and innovative promises.
Holmes and Balwani separated as the company dissolved, and she claimed that he had controlled and abused her throughout their relationship. While battling legal charges, Holmes fell in love with and married Billy Evans, who supported her through trial proceedings. She now goes by Liz, speaks in her natural voice, and has two children. She volunteered for a rape crisis hotline before beginning her sentence.