Holmes devised a more humane, convenient and inexpensive way to scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems by taking a few drops of blood from a finger prick.
A jury finds fallen Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes Convicted of fraud for turning his blood-testing startup Theranos into a sophisticated sham—one that tricked billionaires and other unwitting investors into backing a revolutionary company whose medical technology never worked as promised by Holmes .
Holmes, 37, was found guilty on Monday of two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud after 7 days of deliberation. The jury’s decision followed a three-month trial involving dozens of witnesses—including Holmes himself—and several demonstrations. He now faces up to 20 years in prison for each guilty count, although legal experts say he is unlikely to receive anything close to the maximum sentence.
The jury stalemate on the remaining three charges. David Ring, an attorney who has followed the Holmes case closely, said the split verdict “is a mixed bag for prosecution, but it is a loss for Elizabeth Holmes because she is going to jail for at least a few years.”
Federal prosecutors spent much of their time providing testimony and evidence to portray Holmes as a charlatan obsessed with fame and fortune. In seven days, Holmes casts herself as a visionary trailblazer in male-dominated Silicon Valley who was emotionally and sexually abused by her ex-boyfriend and business partner Sunny Balwani.
Holmes, who bowed his head several times before the jury’s vote by US District Judge Edward Davila, remained seated and expressed no apparent emotion when the judgment was read. His partner, Billy Evans, showed movement in the moments before but appeared calm as he read the verdict. After the judge left the courtroom to meet the jury members in person, Holmes stood up to hug Evans and his parents before leaving with his lawyers.
Jail time will separate Holmes from her newborn son, whose birth last summer forced a delay in the trial. Holmes’s paternity was not disclosed to the jury during the trial. Mr. Davila will determine the sentence for Holmes.
The test provided an inside detailed look at one of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs’ go-to moves — expressing an immense optimism, whether or not it warrants, that “fake it ’til you make it”. is referred to as.
That ethos helped groundbreaking companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Apple—the latter, of course, co-founded by one of Holmes’ heroes, Steve Jobs.
But the bold dream that Holmes pursued when Theranos was founded in 2003 at the age of 19 had turned into a fatal nightmare until he was indicted on felony charges in 2018. Her conviction can buck wattage—at least temporarily—on the brutal promises and bold exaggerations that have become a regular part of the tech industry’s innovation bustle.
During that period, Holmes went from an unknown to a Silicon Valley sensation, having amassed a fortune of $4.5 billion on paper and a blatant failure. Her downfall has been dissected in documentaries, books, podcasts and will soon lead to a Hulu TV series called “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried.
Holmes devised a more humane, convenient and inexpensive way to scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems by taking a few drops of blood with a finger prick rather than sticking needles into people’s veins. It aimed to elevate an industry dominated by giant testing companies such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, starting with setting up “mini-labs” in Walgreens and Safeway stores across the US that use a tiny Theranos device called Edison. Better to run faster. and less intrusive blood tests.
The concept—and the way Holmes presented it—thrilled wealthy investors eager to buy an initial stake in a game-changing company. It helped Theranos raise more than $900 million from knowledgeable billionaires such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch and software magnate Larry Ellison, as well as affluent families such as Walmart’s Waltons and the DeVos clan behind Amway.
Holmes also attracted a well-connected board that included two former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger and the late George Schultz: two former Defense Secretaries, Generals James Mattis and William Perry; Former Sen. Sam Nunn; and Richard Kovacevich, former CEO of Wells Fargo. He also charmed former President Bill Clinton in an on-stage presentation and impressed then-Vice President Joe Biden, who praised him during a visit to the Theranos lab in 2015.
What most people did not know at the time was that Theranos’ blood testing technology kept giving misleading results. This forced patients to draw regular venous blood instead of the promised fingersticks and prompted Theranos to secretly test those samples using traditional machines in a traditional laboratory setting. Evidence presented at trial also shows that Holmes lied about alleged deals that Theranos reached with large drug companies such as Pfizer and the US military.
After a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal and a regulatory audit of Theranos the deception eventually exposed potentially dangerous flaws in the company’s technology in 2015, leading to the company’s eventual collapse.
During her seven days of testimony, Holmes sometimes expressed remorse for dealing with a variety of issues, but often argued that she had forgotten the circumstances surrounding some of the key events spotted by the prosecution. He insisted that he never stopped believing that Theranos was on the verge of refining its technology.
Instead, she laid the blame on Balwani, with whom she lived secretly from 2009 to 2016 as chief operating officer of Theranos. Holmes testified that Balwani frustrated her by failing to fix the lab problems she had promised to fix and, in the most dramatic testimony of the trial, alleged that she had changed her diet, sleeping habits, and Controlling the friendship had turned her into his pawn through a long-running pattern of abuse. It all happened, she said, after she was raped by an unknown assailant while she was still enrolled at Stanford.
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