It took only a few months for Elizabeth Holmes to reach the top of Forbes’ list of ‘America’s 50 Richest Self-Made Women’. Luck List of ‘The World’s 19 Most Disappointing Leaders’ with Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals and Dilma Rousseff, then President of Brazil. By this time, in 2016, the story was unfolding about the revolutionary blood testing technology of his company, Theranos. Theranos did not survive the outcome of the regulatory investigation that followed, and it ended in 2018.
But the jury is still, literally, out on Holmes’ fate. In recent weeks, a dozen jurors have been deliberating against him in a case of criminal fraud. The case was brought against him and the company’s former COO Ramesh Balwani in 2018, accusing them of “two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud”. It is alleged that he cheated doctors, patients and investors.
They are accused of making false claims about their blood-testing technology to doctors and patients, even though they “knew that Theranos was not able to consistently produce accurate and reliable results” for certain blood tests. He is also accused of making “multiple misrepresentations to potential investors” about the company’s financial position and its prospects. For example, the defendants “represented investors that Theranos would generate more than $100 million in revenue and break even in 2014 and Theranos expected to generate approximately $1 billion in revenue in 2015; when, in truth , the defendants knew that Theranos would generate only negligible or modest revenue in 2014 and 2015. If convicted, they could face 20 years in prison.
In her legal defence, she has pleaded not guilty, and has also pleaded not guilty to her ex-boyfriend Mr. Balwani for emotional and sexual abuse. He has reportedly denied the allegation.
ups and downs
It was in 2003 that Ms Holmes, a Stanford dropout and just 19 at the time, started Theranos, reportedly a combination of ‘therapy’ and ‘diagnosis’. “When Elizabeth Holmes emerged on the tech scene around 2003,” Vanity Fair wrote, “she had a pre-eminently good story”. It said, “She was a woman. She was building a company that really aimed to change the world. And, as a 19-year-old first-year dark-haired girl at Stanford University’s School of Chemical Engineering, She already compared herself to a typical Joban fashion.For example, she always wore a black turtleneck and practiced vegetarianism.
Theranos, at first, hardly made any noise. In 2011, former US Secretary of State George Schultz joined its board. In the years that followed, many people with experience in government joined the board. The list included former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and four-star General James Mattis, who later became Secretary of Defense. In a video interview that was featured in the documentary inventor, Ms Holmes recalls how she was “absolutely horrified” by the process of drawing blood for testing. Theranos technology promised to revolutionize the process by requiring just a finger prick to run hundreds of types of blood tests.
Employees outside to talk to the documentary’s producers after the bubble burst, recall a company that was highly secretive in its operations and nurtured a culture of paranoia. Technology and its workings were outside the bounds of the outside world. Employees also reveal the vast gap that exists between the promise and the actual performance of its test equipment, which was called Edison. The fact that Theranos had to rely on commercially available machines for testing rather than its technology was eventually exposed in a wall street journal Article.
Until then, none of the big names joining the Theranos board had suspected anything wrong. Neither did investors such as Ruper Murdoch or the Walton family, who, along with other high-profile investors, invested $400 million in the company. At the age of 31, when he acted Forbes On the list, Ms. Holmes had a net worth of $4.5 billion. His company was valued at $9 billion. It was as good as it was for Ms. Holmes and Theranos.
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