Disgraced Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes is set to report to prison this week to begin her 11-year sentence for the blood-testing scam at the heart of her start-up.
Theranos raised nearly $1billion (£800m) from wealthy investors such as Rupert Murdoch after she promised to provide revolutionary tech to scan for hundreds of diseases and other potential problems with just a few drops of blood.
But the Silicon Valley sensation, with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper, in 2014 unravelled when an explosive Wall Street Journal investigation and regulatory reviews exposed dangerous flaws in Theranos’s technology.
Holmes will be leaving behind two young children — a son born in July 2021 a few weeks before the start of her trial and a 3-month old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022.
Holmes has been free on bail since then, most recently living in the San Diego area with the children’s father, William “Billy” Evans.
The couple met in 2017 around the same time Holmes was under investigation for the collapse of Theranos, a startup she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19.
An appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday she must begin serving her sentence of 11 years and three months for defrauding investors.
Holmes was positioned as the female Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk after dropping out of Stanford during her sophomore year to pursue Theranos, which takes its name from “therapy” and “diagnostics”.
Once one of Silicon Valley‘s most high-profile wunderkinds, she was feted by the likes of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
She modelled her image on Steve Jobs, hiring former Apple employees and even wearing his signature black turtlenecks.
“It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life,” she told Glamour.
Holmes was also accused of beginning to speak in what people who knew her before insisted was a fake deep voice.
Even when the scandal was uncovered, Holmes remained almost eerily calm. During the final days of Theranos, she was pictured partying at Burning Man.
She and her former COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, both pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud.
In her deposition, Holmes said “I don’t know” more than 600 times. She also revealed that she and Balwani had been in a romantic relationship and had been living together — a fact they hadn’t disclosed to the investors from whom they took hundreds of millions of dollars.
Balwani, 57, began a nearly 13-year prison sentence in April after being convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy last July.
He was incarcerated in a Southern California prison last month after losing a similar effort to remain free on bail while appealing his conviction.
In his restitution ruling, Davila determined that Holmes and Balwani should pay media mogul Rupert Murdoch $125m (£100m) - by far the most among the investors listed in his order.
District judge Davila has recommended that Holmes serves her sentence at a women’s prison in Bryan, Texas.
