Jury convicts Theranos founder of 4 fraud counts

Holmes not guilty on 4 other charges over her tech firm.

A federal jury found Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four counts of wire fraud, delivering a verdict on the long-running controversy over her role in the now defunct blood-testing technology startup. The jury found her not guilty on four counts and deadlocked on three counts.

The jury of eight men and four women returned their verdict on the seventh full day of deliberations, marking a big win for the government and its yearslong probe into the entrepreneur.

The decision cements what multiple media investigations, podcasts and documentaries have highlighted over the past six years: that Holmes knowingly misled investors into thinking that her company’s blood-testing technology worked better than it really did.

The jury on Monday said they were deadlocked on three counts.

The judge instructed them to continue deliberating the remaining eight counts.

The jury decided to side with the government’s case, which laid out reams of evidence to support its allegations.

“She chose fraud over business failure. She chose to be dishonest with investors and with patients,” prosecutor Jeff Schenk said in his closing statement.

The trial opened a window into the secretive world of Silicon Valley startups, granting a rare peek into a place where CEOS rarely stand for trial and companies often skirt regulatory consequences. The industry is known for its “fake it until you make it” adage, which leads some founders to over-hype their products. But Holmes’s story stood out as an oft-cited extreme example of that culture due to the high-profile investors she attracted and Theranos’s direct involvement in patient health care.

Theranos’s tabletop blood-testing device purported to be able to run hundreds of blood tests from just a few drops of finger pricked blood more cheaply and quickly. It also promised less pain than traditional blood draws taken from a patient’s arm and performed on traditional lab equipment.

The downfall of Theranos, and Holmes with it, captivated people around the country when the company dissolved in 2018 after years of regulatory investigations and media scandals.

In the years prior, Holmes had become a symbol of success of young female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

But her fall came as quickly as her rise.

In 2015, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into Theranos, unveiling a dysfunctional workplace and employees concerned about the reliability of blood test results.