Elizabeth Holmes enters Texas prison to begin 11-year sentence for blood-testing hoax
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes entered a Texas prison where she could spend the next 11 years for overseeing a blood-testing hoax that became a parable about greed and hubris in Silicon Valley, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Holmes, 39, on Tuesday entered a federal women’s prison camp in Bryan, Texas. The minimum-security facility is about 95 miles northwest of Houston, where Holmes grew up aspiring to become a tech visionary along the lines of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
As she began her sentence, Holmes left 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 that she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19.
While she was building up Theranos, Holmes grew closer to Ramesh, “Sunny” Balwani, who would become her romantic partner as well as an investor and fellow executive in the Palo Alto, California, company.
Together, Holmes and Balwani promised Theranos would revolutionize healthcare with a technology that could quickly scan for diseases and other problems
with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from enthralled investors, assemble a board of directors that included former presidential Cabinet members George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and James Mattis and turned Holmes into a Silicon Valley sensation with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper in 2014.
But it all blew up after dangerous flaws in Theranos’ technology were exposed in a series of explosive articles in The Wall
Street Journal. Holmes and Balwani, who had been secretly living together while running Theranos, broke up after the Journal’s revelations and the company collapsed. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged both with a litany of white-collar crimes in a case aimed at putting a stop to the Silicon Valley practice of overselling the capabilities of a still-developing technology — a technique that became known as “fake it ’til you make it.”
Balwani, 57, is currently serving a nearly 13-year sentence in a Southern California prison.