She is now behind bars. Sentenced last November for lying to her investors about the real progress of her company Theranos, the former entrepreneur arrived Tuesday at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas, confirmed the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
In January 2022, after a four-month trial, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of deception in raising funds for Theranos, which claimed to be able to revolutionize the world of medical diagnostics. She tried several legal appeals not to go to jail pending a possible appeal, hoping to have her conviction overturned, but they were rejected.
Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes arrives at the Texas prison where she'll serve her 11-year sentence for overseeing a blood-testing hoax that garnered national attention.https://t.co/fhOVVYa0b0 pic.twitter.com/uNYDv7CcIA
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 30, 2023
At 39, twenty years after founding the start-up, she is behind bars in a women's institution, equipped with a "minimum" security device. According to the BOP website, this type of prison has dormitories, a low number of guards and rehabilitation programmes.
Investors cheated
Theranos promised faster and cheaper diagnostics than traditional laboratories, thanks to methods presented as revolutionary, allowing multiple tests with a very small amount of blood. But the technology never worked as promised, and the company closed in 2018, leaving investors who had injected hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's capital.
Read alsoElizabeth Holmes, the biggest scam in the history of Silicon Valley?
Elizabeth Holmes has always claimed her good faith, denying that she knowingly sought to deceive investors. In mid-May, Judge Edward Davila ordered him and former Theranos COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani to jointly and severally return $452 million to investors. Among them, Rupert Murdoch, to whom the two former partners owe $ 125 million.
The decline of a rising star
In an interview with the New York Times, published in early May, Elizabeth Holmes explained that even before the damages, she was unable to pay her legal fees, which the prosecution estimated at more than $ 30 million. "I'm going to have to work for the rest of my life to pay them back," she said.
The press reported that she married Billy Evans, whose family owns a hotel chain, in 2019. She has two young children. Her story fascinated the American media, because before her downfall, she embodied a certain image of innovative Silicon Valley. In 2014, Forbes valued Elizabeth Holmes' fortune at $4.5 billion and described her as the youngest female billionaire who did not inherit her fortune.