Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the failed blood-testing firm Theranos, has been approved to leave federal prison for a halfway house, according to the US Department of Justice's Victim Notification System.
Holmes, 42, is due to transfer to the Austin Transitional Center in Del Valle, Texas, on 23 August 2027. She has been held since May 2023 at a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, after her conviction for defrauding Theranos investors.
The move would take her out of the prison camp roughly four years into an original sentence of more than 11 years, and about two and a half years before her scheduled February 2030 release. The Bureau of Prisons declined to discuss her release plans.
What Is Theranos?
Holmes founded the company in 2003 as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, first calling it Real-Time Cures before settling on Theranos, a blend of the words 'therapy' and 'diagnosis'.
Theranos said it could run hundreds of medical tests, from cancer to diabetes, on a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick. The device at the centre of that promise was called the Edison.
The money followed. Theranos raised roughly $945M (£714M) and reached a $9B (£6.8B) valuation in 2014, drawing backing from figures including media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. It also struck a deal to place testing centres inside dozens of Walgreens pharmacies.
The story began to unravel in 2015. That year, the Wall Street Journal, in an investigation by reporter John Carreyrou, revealed that Theranos ran most of its tests on standard commercial machines rather than its own device, often with unreliable results. Only 12 types of test were ever run on the Edison, court records show, and the company later voided results from the device. Theranos dissolved in September 2018.
What Did She Do?
A federal grand jury indicted Holmes and Ramesh 'Sunny' Balwani, the company's president and her former partner, in 2018 on wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Their cases were later split after Holmes alleged that Balwani had been abusive, a claim he denied, and each was tried alone.
On 3 January 2022, a jury convicted Holmes on four counts, three of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to defraud investors. She was acquitted of the charges relating to patients, and jurors could not agree on three further counts.
That November, US District Judge Edward Davila sentenced her to 135 months, about 11 years and three months, with three years of supervised release to follow. Balwani, convicted on all 12 counts against him, received 155 months, nearly 13 years, and the pair were ordered to pay $452M (£342M) in restitution to their 14 victims.
Her appeal failed in February 2025, when the Ninth Circuit upheld the conviction and the restitution order and later refused a rehearing, leaving the Supreme Court as her only remaining route. In March 2026, Davila trimmed her term to 123 months under a guideline for first-time offenders, though he stressed the cut 'does not diminish the enormity of Holmes's crimes.'
Her lawyers had argued that she kept a clean disciplinary record in custody. A separate request asking President Donald Trump to commute her sentence remains unresolved.
What Is Her Net Worth?
At the company's peak in 2014, Forbes valued Holmes's stake at $4.5B (£3.4B) and named her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. She owned about half of Theranos.
That paper fortune vanished with the company. Forbes revised her net worth to $0 in 2016, once her shares were judged effectively worthless, and the estimate has not moved since. She still owes her share of the $452M (£342M) restitution, and prosecutors say she has paid little of it. The reduction cut her prison time, not that debt.
Is She Married?
Holmes married hotel heir Billy Evans in 2019, two years after the two met as Theranos was collapsing. They have two children, a son, William, born in 2021, and a daughter, Invicta, born in 2023.
Evans has since launched his own blood-testing startup, Haemanthus, which uses lasers to analyse samples and has drawn comparisons with Theranos. The New York Times reported that he raised millions of dollars from investors, though the company says Holmes holds no formal role.
Her downfall has inspired the book Bad Blood and the Hulu series The Dropout, and she is the subject of a new A24 documentary, You Can See Everything, due in October 2026. In its trailer, released the same week as the transfer news, Holmes maintained she 'did not' do anything wrong, a stance an X account in her name has echoed from prison.
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