SAN JOSE, Calif – Former Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes is heading to a federal courthouse here on Friday to beg for leniency during her sentencing hearing, likely the final chapter in the years-long saga of Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded. Prosecutors are expected to argue that she deserves 15 years in prison.
Judgment day for Holmes follows a jury convicting her on fours counts of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars with false and misleading claims about what her supposedly breakthrough technology could do with just a few drops of blood. Behind the scenes, it turned out, she was relying on traditional lab testing machines.
In 2014, Theranos was estimated to be worth $9 billion, more than the value of Uber and Spotify at the time. Not long after, the company began to unravel.
