“Elizabeth Holmes, once Silicon Valley’s youngest billionaire, now behind bars for defrauding investors”

After becoming a Silicon Valley icon and the world’s youngest billionaire, her life is turned upside down overnight as Elizabeth Holmes must now wake up at 6am every morning, hold a job paying less than $0.12 an hour, and share shower facilities in a South Texas jail.

After being convicted of multiple charges, including defrauding investors during her management of the startup Theranos, American girl Elizabeth Holmes will spend 11 years of her life behind bars.

And everything in her life turned upside down. After she was appearing on the covers of magazines alongside prominent figures such as former US President Bill Clinton, and attracting personalities to invest in her startup, which promised to test a wide range of health problems using a few drops of blood, everything began to change. The collapse after a damning Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015.

False claims

Holmes was found guilty of falsely claiming that her nascent blood lab could diagnose a large number of conditions using just one drop of blood.

Before Wall Street Journal reporter John Carrio exposed her company’s false claims, Holmes herself had a net worth of $4.5 billion at the age of just 30, according to Forbes.

US District Court Judge Edward Davila ordered the young billionaire to be brought to prison yesterday, Tuesday (May 30, 2023), after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected her plea to remain at large while appealing her conviction.

Elizabeth Holmes (AP)

As of last night, the mother-of-two shares a bunk bed in her jail cell with at least three other women.

She will live among other famous inmates, including reality TV stars Jin Shah and Gina Ryan, who was convicted of participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, according to the New York Post.

The youngest billionaire

And Holmes was the youngest billionaire in America in 2014, when she was a young woman of 30 years old, who left her university studies to establish a company that could change the face of health services in America, as she claimed at the time.

Elizabeth left her studies at Stanford University, to join, at the age of 19, the implementation of her plans to establish her own company, and to obtain capital, she spent what her parents had saved for her education.

Elizabeth Holmes (AP)

Through her company, Theranos, she was able to control a medical diagnostics sector valued at about $ 76 billion, but she needed a new idea to change the world of blood tests, which had witnessed minor changes since the sixties of the last century.

And her idea was a small prick to take a small sample of blood and with this sample more than 70 laboratory tests could be performed, which helped to get rid of the traditional methods in which acupuncture was used to draw blood.

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