Global Courant 2023-05-31 00:57:34
Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has begun her prison sentence in Texas. The 39-year-old will spend the next 11 years behind bars after pleading guilty to overseeing a notorious blood test scam.
She entered the federal women’s prison camp in Bryan, Texas, on Tuesday, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The prison camp is a minimum security facility housing approximately 650 women, considered the lowest security risk.
Prison camps are often minimally staffed and many of the people incarcerated there work prison jobs. Last year, a jury convicted Holmes of four counts of fraud and conspiracy. She was sentenced to prison in November.
Holmes had been out on parole, living in the San Diego area. She came under investigation in 2017 for bankrupting Theranos, a startup she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19. The young woman became a Silicon Valley sensation when she promised Theranos that it would revolutionize health care, thanks to a technology that could quickly scan for diseases and other problems with a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick.
Forbes named Holmes the world’s youngest female billionaire in 2014, when she was 30 and her stake in Theranos was worth $4.5 billion. Theranos raised nearly $1 billion from investors, but it all fell apart after the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles exposing serious flaws in Theranos’ technology.
While building Theranos, Holmes grew closer to Ramesh, ‘Sunny’ Balwani, who would become her romantic partner, as well as an investor and fellow executive at the Palo Alto, California company. Holmes and Balwani, who secretly cohabited while running Theranos, split after the Journal revelations and the company’s bankruptcy.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice charged the two with a series of felonies aimed at ending the Silicon Valley practice of overselling the capabilities of a still-developing technology, a technique that became known as “fake it until you make it.” “fake it ’til you make it”.
Holmes admitted to wrongdoing at Theranos, but steadfastly denied wrongdoing during 7 days of testimony on the witness stand during her trial. As she begins her sentence, Holmes leaves behind two young children – a son born in July 2021 weeks before her trial began and a three-month-old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her of three counts of defrauding investors and a conspiracy charge last January.
Holmes dated the children’s father, William ‘Billy’ Evans, in 2017 at the same time she was under investigation for the Therano takedown.
Holmes in federal court in San Jose, California last October. Photo: AP
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