Silicon Valley fraudster: Who is Elizabeth Holmes?

The 37-year-old young billionaire, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who Forbes magazine called "the youngest woman in the world to become a self-made billionaire" and Inc, magazine "the next Steve Jobs", was found guilty of fraud.

Prosecutors claimed that Holmes knowingly lied about technology that allegedly detected diseases with a few drops of blood.

Jurors found Holmes guilty on four different charges. These include conspiracy to defraud investors and three electronic scams.

And on November 18, 2022, the verdict was announced: Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing company Theranos, was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison in the trial in the USA.

IT WAS THE EYEBROW OF THE SILICON VALLEY

Valued at $9 billion at one point, Theranos was once a Silicon Valley favorite company.

While the company promised to revolutionize the healthcare industry, its claims began to fail after the Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that its blood test technology was not working. It officially closed in 2018.

In the four-month trial, a jury of eight men and four women was presented with two very different views of the billionaire woman whose fall shocked Silicon Valley.

HE SAID "I DID NOT KNOW IT"

In her defense, Holmes claimed that while Theranos admitted faults in its operations, it had never knowingly defrauded patients or investors.

The defense also accused Holmes' former business partner and long-term boyfriend Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani.

Holmes accused Balwani, who is 19 years older than her, of emotional and sexual abuse. In her seven-day testimony, Elizabeth Holmes spoke of an intense relationship in which Balwani controlled the management of Theranos, who she spoke to, how she spoke, and what she ate. Balwani denied the accusations.

Big names backed the company

While the company was promising to revolutionize the healthcare industry, it had a hard time when the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2015 that its blood-testing technology was not working.

The company officially shut down in 2018 after these allegations.

Holmes founded Theranos shortly after leaving Stanford University's Department of Chemical Engineering at the age of 19.

The company claimed it could detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes with a few drops of blood.

Holmes managed to raise $900 million in funding from billionaires such as media giant Rupert Murdoch and tech giant Larry Ellison.

In the years of its establishment, the company's board of directors included names such as Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, and General James Mattis.

Grown under pressure to succeed

It is not known why Holmes, whose books have been written about, an HBO documentary has been made, TV series, movies, and podcasts have been made about, gambled to engage in a technology she did not know very well.

According to those who know her, she grew up in Washington DC, the capital of the USA, as the kind but an introverted child of a wealthy family.

Businessman Richard Fuisz, whose family lives next door, estimates that there is a lot of pressure on Holmes to succeed.

As Fuisz told the BBC, Holmes' parents, who were bureaucrats, "placed a high value on the status and lived on for solid connections".

Her great-grandfather was also the founder of Fleischmann's Yeast, which changed the US bread industry.

At the age of 9, Holmes wrote to her father that “what she wanted to do in life was to discover something new that no one else knew.”

Phyllis Gardner, an expert in clinical pharmacology at Stanford University, said that the idea of ​​​​the skin patch that Holmes came up with during her years at the university would not work.

A child was born this year

Former dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jeffrey Flier said, “She was very confident. When I asked questions about the company's technology, she didn't seem to understand." "It seemed a bit strange to me, but I didn't think it was a fraud," he said.

Flier included Holmes on the school's advisory board, though he later regretted it.

Holmes was sacked after the scandal erupted.

In 2015, a scandal emerged with the Wall Street Journal's reveal series after an insider at Theranos voiced concerns about the company's leading Edison-named tester.

The company's results were unreliable, the paper revealed, and other commercial companies' devices on the market were used in the testing process.

Lawsuits were filed, the company's partners cut ties, and in 2016 Holmes was officially banned from participating in blood-related studies.

After the company was shut down in 2018, Holmes was arrested with Balwani.

Released on bail in 2019, Holmes married William Billy Evans, a 27-year-old heir to the Evans hotel group.

This year, the couple had a child born.

It has been suggested that having a child by Holmes could change the jury's decision, but it did not.

Holmes astonished those who knew her by sticking to her first story from start to finish and painting an image that showed she hadn't changed.