“Founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, Enters Prison for 11-Year Fraud Sentence”

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, entered prison today. Former manager convicted of investor defrauding entered Bryan, Texas women’s prison where she will serve her sentence 11 years’ imprisonment for fraud. Holmes with his Theranos had bewitched Silicon Valley and Wall Street promising to revolutionize the medical laboratory industry. Other illustrious names such as Rupert Murdoch and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger believed her. A series of articles by Wall Street Journal in 2015, however, it aroused the attention of the authorities who began to investigate, discovering that behind the promises there was nothing real.

Holmes, now 39 years old, has two children from her husband Billy Evans: William born in July 2021, a few weeks after the start of the trial, and Invicta born only three months ago. You created Theranos when you were just 19 when you decided to drop out of Stanford University to devote himself to his startup (the story is told in the podcast and in the tv series The Dropout). The project was to revolutionize healthcare with technology that could quickly detect diseases by drawing a few drops of blood with a prick on the finger.

The allure of this revolutionary idea allowed Holmes, accompanied on this adventure by Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, to raise almost a billion dollars from investors. In 2014, at the height of her fame, the value of Theranos was estimated at around 4.5 billion. But it was a huge house of cards, which the articles of the Wall Street Journal and investigations by the US Department of Justice brought about the collapse. The first convictions for Holmes came in 2022: now for the woman who wanted to become an iconlike Steve Jobs, prison doors open.