About Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Anne Holmes, an American biotechnology entrepreneur convicted of fraud, was born on February 3, 1984. In 2003, Holmes founded and served as chief executive officer (CEO) of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company whose valuation skyrocketed after the company claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing techniques that could use surprisingly small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick.
Based on Holmes’ company’s $9 billion valuations, Forbes ranked her as the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States in 2015.
The following year, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes’s net worth to zero as revelations of potential fraud surrounding Theranos’s claims emerged. According to Fortune, she is one of the “World’s 19 Most Disappointing LeadersFortune has named her one of “The World’s 19 Most Disappointing Leaders.”
In 2015, a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations raised questions about the company’s technology claims and whether Holmes had misled investors and the government. SEC charged “massive fraud” against Theranos and Holmes in 2018 for making false or exaggerated claims about the company’s blood-testing technology; Holmes agreed to pay a $500,000 fine, return 18.9 million shares, and lose voting control of Theranos. She also accepted a 10-year prohibition from serving as an officer or director of a publicly-traded corporation.
In January 2022, Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors and not guilty of defrauding patients in the U.S. v. Holmes et al. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September 2022 and faces up to 20 years in federal prison, along with potentially millions in restitution and fines.
Holmes’s connections and ability to recruit the support of influential individuals, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Mattis, and Betsy DeVos, all of whom had served or would serve as U.S. presidential cabinet officials, contributed to the company’s credibility.
Throughout the majority of Theranos’s history, Holmes had a secret romantic relationship with Balwani. After Theranos’s demise, she began dating hotel heir Billy Evans, with whom she had a son in 2021.
Early Years
Elizabeth Holmes is the daughter of Christian Rasmus Holmes IV. Elizabeth’s father worked as a vice president at Enron, an energy company that went bankrupt because of a scandal involving accounting fraud. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), was a staff member of a congressional committee.
Later, Christian held executive positions in government agencies, including USAID, EPA, and USTDA. Christian Holmes’s ancestry is Danish. Charles Louis Fleischmann, his second great-grandfather and Elizabeth’s third great-grandfather, was a Hungarian immigrant who founded Fleischmann’s Yeast. Charles Louis Fleischmann’s son, Julius Fleischmann, was mayor of Cincinnati from 1900 to 1905 and a businessman.
St. John’s School in Houston, Texas, was Holmes’ alma mater. She began her first business selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities while still in high school, owing to her interest in computer programming.
Her parents had arranged for home tutoring in Mandarin Chinese, and Holmes began attending Stanford University’s summer Mandarin program during her junior year of high school. Consequently, Holmes is proficient in Chinese. At Stanford, Holmes studied chemical engineering and worked as a laboratory assistant and student researcher in the School of Engineering.
Holmes collected blood samples with syringes to test for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) following the conclusion of her first year at the Genome Institute of Singapore. In 2003, she submitted her first patent application for a drug-delivery patch. Her tuition money was used as seed capital for a consumer healthcare technology company after she dropped out of Stanford’s School of Engineering in March 2004.
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Achievement
To “democratize healthcare,” Holmes established Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, in 2003. Due to her apprehension of needles, Holmes sought out the use of minimal volumes of blood for her testing. Phyllis Gardner, Holmes’s medicine professor at Stanford, responded, “I do not think your idea will work,” It was impossible to accomplish what Holmes claimed was possible.
Multiple other expert medical professors informed Holmes of the same. Holmes persisted, and she was able to gain the support of Channing Robertson, her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering.
Holmes renamed the company Theranos in 2003. (a portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). Robertson joined the board of directors as the company’s first member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists. Elizabeth Holmes was a fan of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and she frequently wore black turtleneck sweaters to imitate his fashion sense. Holmes claims that her mother dressed her in black turtlenecks when she was young, but an employee claims that in 2007 she suggested copying Steve Jobs’ iconic Issey Miyake turtleneck look.
Gardner from Stanford also refutes that Holmes has a naturally deep voice; however, her family has maintained that her deep voice is genuine.
Investment and Expansion
By December 2004, Holmes had secured $6 million in funding for the company. By 2010, Theranos had raised more than $92 million in risk capital. In July 2011, Holmes met George Shultz, who had been Secretary of State. After a two-hour meeting, he became a member of Theranos’s board of directors. Over the next three years, Holmes was recognized for assembling “the most distinguished board in U.S. corporate history.”
Holmes ran Theranos in “stealth mode” until September 2013, when the company announced a partnership with Walgreens to launch in-store blood sample collection centres. Eric Topol, the editor-in-chief of Medscape, interviewed her and praised her for “this phenomenal rebooting of laboratory medicine.” Holmes’s 2014 appearances on the covers of Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times Style Magazine and Inc. increased media attention.
In 2014, Forbes recognized Elizabeth Holmes as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire and ranked her #110 on the Forbes 400 list. Theranos had raised more than $400 million in venture capital and valued at $9 billion. Her name appeared on 18 U.S. patents and 66 foreign patents by the end of 2014. Holmes signed agreements with Cleveland Clinic, Capital BlueCross, and AmeriHealth Caritas in 2015 to implement Theranos technology.
Connections
The board and investors of Theranos included numerous influential figures. Tim Draper, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the father of Holmes’s childhood friend Jesse Draper, was Holmes’s first major investor. He “cut Holmes a check” for $1 million after hearing her initial pitch for the company that would become Theranos.
Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, the DeVos family, including Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Enterprises, and Carlos Slim Hel joined the ranks of Theranos’ significant investors. When Theranos failed, these investors lost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
George Shultz was among the first board members of Holmes. The 12-member Theranos board eventually consisted of Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state; William Perry, a former secretary of defence; James Mattis, the future secretary of defence; Gary Roughead, a retired U.S. Navy admiral; Bill Frist, a former U.S. senator (R-TN); Sam Nunn, a former U.S. senator (D-GA); and former CEOs Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo and Riley Bechtel.
Recognition
Before the demise of Theranos, Holmes was widely admired. She was appointed to the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows in 2015. Moreover, she was named one of Time magazine’s “Time 100 most influential people”.
Forbes honoured Holmes with the Under 30 Doers Award and placed her at number 73 on its 2015 list of the world’s most powerful women. After receiving a degree from Pepperdine University, Glamour named her Woman of the Year.
Holmes received the 2015 Horatio Alger Award from the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, becoming the youngest recipient in the award’s history. She was previously named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year and featured in the publication’s 40 Under 40 list.
Elizabeth Holmes Personal Life
Holmes dated technology entrepreneur Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a Pakistani-born Hindu who emigrated to India and then the United States. She met him in 2002 during a Stanford University Mandarin program trip to Beijing. Balwani was 19 years older than Holmes and was married to another woman; Holmes was 18 and had just graduated from high school.
Balwani divorced his wife in 2002 and began a romantic relationship with Holmes in 2003, around the time Holmes left college. In 2005, the couple moved into a shared apartment. Balwani did not officially join Theranos until 2009, when he was named chief operating officer, but he advised Holmes from the company’s inception.
According to employees, Holmes and Balwani ran the company with a corporate culture of “secrecy and fear.” Their romantic relationship was kept a secret for most of their time as business owners. In 2016, Balwani left Theranos due to investigations. Holmes claims she fired him, whereas Balwani asserts that he voluntarily resigned. On November 29, 2021, Holmes testified that she was raped while a student at Stanford and that she sought solace from Balwani after the incident.
During their relationship, which spanned more than a decade, she claimed Balwani was sometimes verbally and sexually abusive towards her. She stated in her testimony that he wanted to “kill the person” she was and create a “new Elizabeth.” She also testified that Balwani did not force her to make the false statements described in the case to investors, business partners, journalists, and company directors. Balwani has “categorically” denied the abuse allegations in court documents, labelling them “false and inciting.”
In 2015, she was ranked as one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a $4.5 billion net worth. Forbes published an updated valuation of Theranos for $800 million in June 2016, which rendered Holmes’s stake virtually worthless because other investors owned preferred shares and would have been paid before Holmes, who only owned common stock.
Elizabeth Holmes reportedly owed Theranos $25 million concerning exercising stock options. Due to the arrangement, she did not receive any company cash or sell any of her shares, including those associated with the debt.
Holmes became engaged to William “Billy” Evans, the 27-year-old heir to Evans Hotels, a family-owned hotel chain in the San Diego area, in early 2019. Holmes and Evans reportedly wed in a private ceremony in the middle of 2019. Holmes and Evans have not confirmed their marital status, and several sources continue to refer to him as her “partner” rather than her husband. The couple are San Francisco residents, and Elizabeth Holmes delivered a son in July 2021.
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Elizabeth Holmes’s Net Worth
Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth was estimated to be $4.5 billion in 2015 by Forbes. However, Elizabeth Holmes’ net worth plummeted from $4.5 billion to zero by 2022 following the collapse of Theranos.
Originally scheduled to begin in August 2020, Holmes’ trial was delayed due to her pregnancy. Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud on January 3, 2022. An 80-year sentence and a $1 million fine are possible punishments for each count. Holmes is currently out on bail pending sentencing in September 2022.